Stanford Graduate School of Business professor Amir Goldberg and Sameer Srivastava at the University of California, Berkeley in their new paper titled “Fitting in or Standing Out? The Tradeoffs of Structural and Cultural Embeddedness,” explore the relationship between fitting in, standing out, and success within an organisation.
The paper, written in collaboration with Christopher Potts, an associate professor of linguistics at Stanford, and graduate researchers Govind Manian and Will Monroe, looks into the relationship between fitting in, standing out, and success within an organisation.
A lot of people, from teenagers to executives to sociologists have often confronted this dilemma. Goldberg provides a simple answer. He says, “It depends”. If you are a type of person who turns up at the office in casual clothes when the rest of your colleagues are in formal attire, you would need to fit in structurally, by being part of a tight-knit group. If you stand out structurally by not being a member of any one clique at work but have friends across departments, then you better fit in culturally and dump the casual wear.
The dilemma becomes more acute for the executives as the corporate world puts more value on those who stand out from the rest, rewarding them with promotions and salary increases. “No one wants to be perceived as average or replaceable, especially in tech companies that value innovation, diversity, and creativity,” Goldberg is quoted as saying in an article in Insights by Stanford Business.
The researchers concluded that employees in the firm can be characterised by their levels of cultural and structural “embeddedness,” after measuring their general cultural assimilation as well as the strength of their attachment to various network cliques.
But fitting into a company is equally important. It creates a larger, motivating sense of identity for employees and enables them to be productive members of the organisation, which by definition depends on cooperation. The result is a conflicting pressure on workers to fit in and, at the same time, stand out.
In trying to learn more about that tension and find ways to resolve it, they adopted a new method of examining the language used in corporate emails. Having been granted access to a mid-sized technology company’s complete archive of email messages exchanged among 601 full-time employees between 2009 and 2014, they started the analysis.
For protecting privacy and confidentiality, only emails exchanged among employees were taken up. Messages sent to or received from people outside the company were excluded, as also those exchanged among the seven members of the executive team and with the firm’s attorneys.
After storing the raw data on secure research servers installed at the company, the researchers created an algorithm that could analyse the natural language in the emails. They used an established language analysis program to look for specific words such as “I” or “we,” as well as “should” or “would.” They also looked for expletives because, in some companies, swearing is a way to assert authority. In such places, if a new person comes in and uses very polite language, it would be reflective of a low level of cultural assimilation in the company where cursing is acceptable, Goldberg says.
They also examined the structure and pattern of email interactions to learn more about small, tight-knit cliques within the organisation. Employees who are able to bridge the gaps between these cliques stands to benefit because of the information that flows to them from different groups. “They are able to connect networks that are usually disconnected, so they serve an important role,” says Goldberg.
While gauging an employee’s success, the researchers also human resource data supplied by the company. In addition to employee age, gender, and tenure, it identified all employees who had left the company and whether their departure was voluntary or involuntary. That data enabled the researchers to correlate professional success with fitting in and standing out. Goldberg attributes involuntary exits to negative attainment.
The researchers concluded that employees in the firm can be characterised by their levels of cultural and structural “embeddedness,” after measuring their general cultural assimilation as well as the strength of their attachment to various network cliques. They identified four organisational archetypes: “doubly embedded actors,” “disembedded actors,” “assimilated brokers” and “integrated nonconformists.”
Those most likely to get ahead are what they call “assimilated brokers,” meaning people who are high on cultural fit and low on network cliquishness, and their mirror images, the “integrated nonconformists,” meaning people who are part of a tight-knit group but still stand out culturally.
The assimilated broker is identified as the ultimate networker, the person with friends in marketing, customer service, engineering. Well-connected across the firm but not really a part of any one group. Yet, such persons are able to blend in culturally, speak and dress the same as everyone else.
The integrated nonconformist, on the other hand, has the security and mutual commitment that comes from being part of a clique but has not fully assimilated into the corporate culture. The “doubly embedded” employee, is both culturally compliant and part of a dense network. He never stands out and is unlikely to move ahead. Think of the geeky software engineer who is part of his tight little team, but doesn’t interact outside that group.
The archetype most likely to lose his job is the “disembedded actor,” who interacts with people in different parts of the organisation but isn’t part of any one group and doesn’t fit in culturally either.
Comparing their email analysis to the company’s personnel records, the researchers found that workers identified as doubly embedded actors were over three times more likely to be involuntarily terminated than those identified as integrated nonconformists.
Clearly, both fitting in and standing out are important for career success, but the lesson, says Goldberg, is that if you blend in structurally and culturally — especially in tech firms, which put a premium on creativity and innovation — you will be seen as bland and unremarkable. At the same time, if you dress and speak differently than your peers but you also aren’t part of any one group, you will wind up being perceived as odd and threatening.
The goal is to find a balance between the two. “Either maintain your place as part of a tight-knit group but stand out by behaving a little weirdly, or be the smooth networker who knows what’s going on across the organisation but also knows how to blend in culturally,” says Goldberg. “You want to distinguish yourself from the pack without making anyone in the pack uncomfortable.”(Image Source:Flickr.com)