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We know that people who fit in enjoy their work.
They enjoy the experience of being in an organization.
They're emotionally rewarded by it.
And we all aspire, I imagine, to create organizations where
members of the organization wake up in the morning and want to come and
where they feel attached and indebted to the organization,
and mostly indebted to their peers.
And by creating a healthy cultural environment, we can facilitate that.
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It's the experience of coming to an entirely different cultural context,
that makes visible to you how pervasive culture is.
But also how invisible it is.
So, like an example I always like to use is when I came to the States for
the first time and people would say to me, let's have coffee sometime, and
I would take that as a literal invitation to having coffee sometime.
And I didn't quite understand that in was fact like a very nice pleasant
way to finish a conversation, but where the intention is actually, I don't want to
have coffee with you, but let's just pretend that we had a nice interaction.
And then so I would initially respond by saying, yeah, sure,
let's have coffee sometime, when?
It took me a while to figure out that that wasn't the intention of the speaker.
And it's only when you're kind of transposed to very different cultural
settings that suddenly your lack of cultural skill becomes apparent to you.
And that moment to me kind of highlighted how important but
invisible it is, and why it's important for us to study it.
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Culture is about the systematic distribution of beliefs and
cognitive understandings across a population.
And it's very difficult to measure people's cognition.
Historically we've been doing this by asking them questions, through surveys.
Problem is that surveys are not very good instruments,
because we lie to ourselves, we lie to others.
We sometimes are not very well attached to our cognition and
especially our un-self-conscious cognition acts, what makes it un-self-conscious.
Add to that the fact that it's not very feasible to ask people questions
every day, time and again.
It leads to huge attrition and disengagement.
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The Internet revolution has made a variety of behaviors
that up until recently were not recorded recordable.
And they leave a trace, from how we communicate online to
our purchasing behaviors, everything now leaves a trace.
And marry that with the computational capabilities that we now have.
Our ability just our ability to compute, on our smartphones we now
have computational capabilities that are akin to what NASA had in 1985.
And that, with new machine learning tools,
artificial intelligence, deep learning,
the ability to analyze unstructured complex data and
to reduce it to measurable outcomes, both of these
together bring us to the golden age of cultural analysis.
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So we were very lucky to have collaborated with a few organizations
already that were willing to share information deriving from the email
exchange amongst their employees over a period of multiple years.
By now, myself, my colleagues and all the members of our lab, we've analyzed many,
many years of data being exchanged by members of multiple organizations And
there's a lot of information culturally that we can derive
by looking at how people use language in their emails.
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The reason that language is such a useful way for us to analyze culture
is because language is probably the most important medium through
which cultural information is exchanged between individuals.
I'm not interested in whether when you and
I are talking are we talking about how are we going to address
this particular customer problem, or are we going to talk about HR issues, or
are we going to talk about the Christmas party that's coming up?
What functionally we're exchanging is immaterial to the analysis.
What's interesting is whether in discussing these topics, we're using
the same kind of linguistic styles as a reflection of our cultural alignment.
So whether we're using aggressive and
brief language or whether we're very apologetic.
And you can just think about all your email exchanges, there's a significant
difference between saying dear so and so, it was such a pleasure to meet you and
I hope that this is not an intrusion on your time, etc.
But if you don't mind, at your earliest convenience, can we please meet?
And you can say the exact same thing but say, hey John, can we meet next week?
Without all of the introductions and apologies.
Functionally you've exchanged the exact same information, but
there's a lot of cultural content embedded in how you chose to present yourself and
the problem and the question.
And that's precisely what our analysis tries to infer.
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Swear words are very, from a symbolic point of view, they're very aggressive.
Somebody drops an F bomb, it's noticeable.
It's not a subtle thing that people do as they speak.
And if you think about the organizations that you've been in or
the various cultural contexts in which you've gone through through your life,
there's a lot of variation in terms of whether it's allowed or
really a faux pas to use swear words in interaction.
And you can imagine that there are certain organisations where not only
do people swear a lot,
they use swearing as a means to project to others their authority and their tenacity.
And you can imagine, at the other extreme, that there are organizations where
the use of swear words is perceived as an offensive and
inappropriate way of handling yourself and would be interpreted as aggression.
So it's the same use of language, but it's interpreted very differently as
a function of what's normatively appropriate or
inappropriate in these two different settings.
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In the research that I do and where we analyze how people use language in their
interactions, their habitual way of speaking inside the organization, whether
they swear at the appropriate level is a very strong signal of the extent to which
they're aligned or misaligned with the normative expectations of their peers.
The mere information about whether or not an individual is correctly using language
insofar as how language is being used by others and reflecting their expectations
and beliefs about the world is a very strong indicator of whether that person
reads the cultural code and whether conditional having read it correctly,
whether that person has the motivation to behave in a culturally compliant way.
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So you can imagine that some people realize that it's inappropriate to swear,
but they swear nevertheless.
And that decision,
whether conscious or un-self-conscious, has a lot of information.
They're either signaling to others that
they don't want to be a part of this group, or they might feel so
secure in their position in the group that they believe that
by behaving in a non-conformist way, they can signal to others their
uniqueness without undermining their position in the organization.
So there's a lot of information in these very subtle and
automatic decisions that we make and how we communicate information to one another.
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Discoveries on culture are both exciting and daunting.
They're exciting because we're starting to figure out
the constituent components of this opaque thing that we call culture.
They're daunting because we discover how complex it is, how difficult it is to
manage, and how not one size fit all or one shot exercise it is.
But again, they're exciting because I think we're at this
moment where the research can be translated into insights and
into methodologies and into tools that can inform managerial
decisions in a way that would make management more effective and
more rewarding to everybody involved.
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