Robert Sternberg And The Cultural Immune Response in Action
Dr. Robert Sternberg, a well-known psychologist and, quite frankly, an absolutely brilliant scientist, just managed to get tangled up in the University of Wyoming’s cultural immune response. He’s hardly the first person who has been caught up in such a reaction, although his case is certainly dramatic: he ended up resigning after barely four months as the president of the university.
The cultural immune response is a phenomenon I discuss in my books, The 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development and Organizational Psychology for Managers.
At root, it’s pretty straight-forward: when the human immune system sees something that doesn’t fit, that triggers an immune response and the body attempts to repel the invader. At an organizational level, when someone enters the organization and does not fit with the culture, that person is seen as an invader. The organizational system mobilizes to fight off the invader. If the person entering the organization is a relatively low-level employee, it’s no big deal. The person either changes to match the culture, they leave, or they are fired. The overall culture barely, as it were, sneezes.
The situation is considerably more complex when the person triggering the response is the new president of, say, a university. As I wrote in Organizational Development:
Remember that culture is a roadmap of how the world works. The longer that culture has been in place, the more successful the organization has been, and the more people like the way things are working and are happy with the current situation, the stronger the culture will be. The stronger the culture, the more the roadmap is trusted. The more the roadmap is trusted, the harder it is to change.
When a new leader comes in who does not match with the culture, problems will immediately arise. It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking a group leader or a CEO, although in general the smaller the group, the weaker the culture simply because it is not distributed over as many people. What the new leader is effectively doing is saying, “Everything you know, everything you believe in, is wrong. Trust me. Follow me. I have the truth.”
Now, I suspect that many of you reading that last paragraph are rolling your eyes and thinking, “Yeah, right. It can’t be that big a deal!”
Let’s consider the situation. For the members of the culture, this roadmap, this view of the world, is their common bond. It’s the thing that holds the organization together. By providing structure and predictability, culture reduces anxiety and promotes a feeling of security. Remember also that culture quickly becomes largely unconscious. Behaviors are chunked, no longer thought about on a conscious level.
Then someone comes along and says, “No, no, that’s all wrong.” Imagine being in that position. How would you feel? How did you feel the last time your company announced major changes or restructuring?
In Sternberg’s case, it looks like he tried to do too much too fast without taking the time to build relationships and become part of the specific university culture. By way of contrast, when IBM brought in Lou Gerstner in the early 1990s, Gerstner rapidly made himself part of the IBM culture while still standing partially outside it. While part of this may have been luck in that his background was very similar to that of IBM founder Tom Watson, Gerstner’s taking the time to build connections and visibly recognize and respect the existing culture before he changed it was also a key factor.
I’m not going to attempt a detailed analysis of Sternberg’s actions at the University of Wyoming, particularly since all that I have to go on at this point is the relatively superficial reporting of the events. Organizational change, particularly when it involves a cultural change, is a tricky business; the fact that someone as psychologically savvy as Robert Sternberg got tripped up by it only serves to underscore that point.
Ultimately, change is hard. For the University of Wyoming, having just successfully exiled one leader who attempted to make changes, it just got that much harder. The immune system is now on heightened alert. So, if you’re trying to make a major change in your organization, think carefully about how you can avoid triggering that cultural immune response.
