Edgar Schein Anxiety & Assumptions

• Sir Edward Tyler’s book Primitive Culture from 1870 is often marked as a shift toward the modern definition: that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society
• The emergence of HR? Part of this is excused by the fact that human resources emerged as a reaction to other trends such as the disappearance of unions and the need for companies to manage benefits and even in a darker way
• Schein is to culture what Ogilvy is to Advertising

How does culture arise?

• Coming to a new awareness of Org Culture: Many definitions simply settle for the notion that culture is a set of shared meanings that make it possible for members of a group to interpret and act upon their environment. I believe we must go beyond this definition: even if we knew an organization well enough to live in it, we would not necessarily know how its culture arose, how it came to be what it is, or how it could be changed if organizational survival were at stake.
• Schein’s definition: Organizational culture is the pattern of basic assumptions that a given group has invented, discovered, or developed in learning to cope with its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, and that has worked well enough to be considered valid, and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems.

Culture & Groups

• Culture is the people. There is not a culture a priori that people flock to and assume. At some point sure, but it was the fact that some genesis stored the elements and then from there subsequent groups iterated: Culture is a result of the behavior of individuals and not the other way around. There is no culture unless a group “owns” it.

• Schein’s three layers:
• Artifacts: These are the “visible” symbols of the culture. It can include anything from clothing styles to posters on the wall to the volume of speech. Even if not understood, the artifacts that last are typically deeply tied to the underlying culture.
• Values: These are the “espoused” values – often found on company websites and also the area which has the greatest chance of being disconnected from reality.
• Basic Assumptions: These are the beliefs that people use to make day-to-day decisions within an organization. For example, an assumption may be that “it is best to speak up when I have a good idea.” Judging the assumptions and trade-offs people make on a day-to-day basis is often the quickest way to understand the “real” culture.

Culture Formation

• Two main ways: 1.) Positive problem-solving processes and 2.) anxiety avoidance
• Often #1 is what leads to a company being profitable or having an advantage
• #2 is harder to grasp:
• This is what Schein calls “anxiety avoidance,” or behaviors that help groups to minimize anxiety. Common ways this shows up in a company is through the desire for order, consistency, and control, or ways of relating to others that minimize conflict.
• Avoiding anxiety increases stability: once a response is learned because it successfully avoids anxiety, it is likely to be repeated indefinitely
• Example: One common but frustrating behavior we see in companies is to have a “default to highest-ranking person’s opinion” assumption. This may have helped the company make decisions and avoid internal conflict early on in the company’s fight for survival but it may not be beneficial as the company scales.

Anxiety

• Anxiety inhibits learning, but anxiety is also necessary if learning is going to happen at all.
• Survival vs. learning anxiety
• Learning: Further, learning risks us being pushed out of groups that matter to us. Anyone who has proposed a new way of doing something at work and has experienced a disproportionate response knows what I mean. It’s not that the idea is bad, people just don’t want to risk not belonging.
• When learning threatens our current patterns
• Survival anxiety: if we don’t learn something new, we will not survive.
• It’s a re-frame
• Most companies prefer to increase survival anxiety because that’s the easier way to go. And that, I think, is where organizations have it absolutely wrong. To the extent that our present managerial practices emphasize the stick over the carrot, companies are building in strong resistance to learning
• Managers disproportionate power can often become (even if unintentionally) coercive.
• Ha: Managers have to realize that it’s important not to put a value on learning per se because doing that can be dysfunctional. Consider something as ostensibly innocuous as the learning that is supposed to take place at the off-site meetings and Outward Bound programs that many companies now sponsor. These companies force their employees to climb trees all day and then reveal personal stuff to one another at night. So yes, the group has learned something. But that learning was coerced, and the resulting new team may be dysfunctional because its members are not necessarily being true to themselves. In fact, there are occasions when individuals do the organization a huge favor by refusing to learn.
• This goes back to Mintzberg with strategy as learning, not necessarily direction: Schein is telling us that if an organization aspires to be an adaptive learning organization, it needs to have the humility to realize that it won’t be able to plan learning for its people

Stages of culture

• culture is perpetually being formed in the sense that there is constantly some sort of learning going on about how to relate to the environment and manage internal affairs
• Mid life: This is when the company has stabilized with a number of learned “anxiety avoidance” and problem-solving behaviors.
• Whether the organization needs to enhance the diversity to remain flexible in the face of environmental turbulence, or to create a more homogeneous “strong” culture (as some advocate] becomes one of the toughest strategy decisions management confronts, especially if senior management is unaware of some of its own cultural assumptions

Strong Cultures

• Strength: The “strength” or “amount” of culture can be defined in terms of (1) the homogeneity and stability of group membership and (2) the length and intensity of shared experiences of the group.

Cultural questions he asked:

• What is a belief that people seem to hold here?
• What is a way of behaving that is rewarded here?
• How do people solve problems, especially when stressed?
• What is something that an outsider might say about your team?

MIT Review of Schein

1. Coercive Persuasion
1. Coercion defies our colloquial understandings: “If I’m economically committed to [an] institution, I have tenure, I am going to allow myself — or be forced — to be socialized into their culture. There is no gain in being a dissident or a deviant if I’m stuck there. If I’m stuck there, I’m going to sooner or later be influenced.
2. Career anchors & dynamics
1. Shein’s anchors: What motivates someone to work? What central values drive one’s career? How do employees want to be managed or rewarded?
2. Definition: “motivational/attitudinal/value syndrome which guides and constrains the person’s career.”
3. The eight anchors are general managerial competence, technical/functional competence, entrepreneurial creativity, autonomy/independence, security/stability, service/dedication to a cause, pure challenge, and lifestyle.

4. Humble inquiry and leadership

• “He was an imaginative listener who could really break through a conversation with the right question at the right time,” Van Maanen said. “That was Ed’s modus operandi: to listen very carefully.”
• According to Schein, self-effacing inquiry is the art of drawing someone out by asking questions to which you do not already know the answer, thereby building a relationship based on curiosity and interest in the other person.

5. Org change

• Influences on org change/culture:
• What a leader regularly focuses on, measures, rewards, and controls.
• How leaders distribute resources and rewards.
• Criteria used for recruitment and retention, performance management, and dismissal.
• Cumulative effect of all the touch points: “In that sense, he had a holistic view of organizations that you can’t just change the incentive system, or you can’t just have the leader tell people to do something different,” Chatman said. “You have to look at all of these touchpoints to drive holistic change that makes sense to people.”