How Tribalism Can Actually Strengthen Workplace Culture

CURT NICKISCH: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Curt Nickisch.

Us versus them is a powerful concept. On the one hand, it’s enormously useful in business competition in winner-take-all markets. And on the other hand, it can prove very divisive. When we talk about polarization in society today or the sense of opposition and internal conflict that organizational leaders grapple with, us versus them can be very self-defeating. In all kinds of spheres, it feels like it has become an us-versus-them world, whether you’re on the same team or not.

Today’s guest studies social psychology and behavioral economics, and he’s thought deeply about the ways that tribalism is ingrained in us humans. He says that our need to belong to tribes doesn’t always have to be a bad thing; that understanding the ways that we connect with each other can actually go a long way to improve organizations.

Michael Morris is a professor at Columbia Business School and the author of the new book, Tribal: How The Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together. Hi, Michael.

MICHAEL MORRIS: Hello. Thank you so much for having me.

CURT NICKISCH: Can we start with the term tribes and tribalism? I think it’d be helpful, before we talk about it in the context of work culture, just to understand it more anthropologically. What is a tribe?

MICHAEL MORRIS: Well, a tribe is a large community that is bound together by shared ideas, shared routines, and shared traditions. To an evolutionary biologist or to a behavioral scientist, a tribe is the distinctive human form of social organization. It allows for communities that are much larger than other primates are capable of because it allows us to transcend kith and kin and feel trust to a broad network of people, many of whom are total strangers to us, but because their behavior and their thoughts are predictable to us, we can trust them and we can collaborate with them.

CURT NICKISCH: So this must have had a big evolutionary advantage?

MICHAEL MORRIS: Yes. It’s what separates humans from the rest of the evolutionary pack, and it led to a culmination, which is referred to as cumulative culture. When tribal instincts had evolved the different human societies, the different human groups at the time started developing a richer pool of shared knowledge each generation because they were able to hang on to the knowledge of the prior generation. And when that happened, they didn’t have to reinvent the wheel every generation and the culture started becoming tuned to the environment that the particular group lived in.

CURT NICKISCH: It does feel like we’re in a very divided world right now. There are countless examples.

MICHAEL MORRIS: It’s true. The word tribal and tribe and tribalism have become much more commonly used in the media. We live in a world where we see a lot of distressing conflicts and the pundits have started talking about these conflicts as reflections of tribalism. They say things like this: that a long-buried deeply evolved drive has reawakened to blur our vision of reality, to make us blindly loyal to one group and to make us hate other groups, to hate outsiders, and to feel hostility towards outsiders.

And it makes for colorful journalism. It’s been picked up by politicians and by some business leaders and it makes for dramatic speeches. It couldn’t really be more wrong as a diagnosis of what causes these conflicts, or it couldn’t be more inaccurate as a description of what instincts distinguish our species from other species. There are tribal instincts that anthropologists have distinguished and that behavioral scientists have learned a tremendous amount through careful experiments. But these are instincts for solidarity, not instincts for hostility. They do occasionally contribute to conflicts, but these conflicts don’t start from hostility.

CURT NICKISCH: One thing I found interesting in your work is that that might also help leaders on teams or trying to lead organizations in tumultuous times. Tribalism is actually a big part of human nature.

MICHAEL MORRIS: I’ve been able to translate my particular area of behavioral science, which is called cultural psychology, into a toolkit for leaders who want to lead through culture, who want to use culture as a way of rallying collective action or pull on people’s cultural wiring in order to orchestrate a cultural change.

CURT NICKISCH: Let’s dive into that a little bit more. How do you see tribes popping up in work culture?

MICHAEL MORRIS: The out-group is often a foil to focus the in-group identity. It’s also a way to create a sense of competition to rally motivation and efforts, so there is an inexorable connection between us and them that leaders have always used, have always taken into account. An organizational culture is usually defined around distinctive in-group ideals. There’s often a tone of moral superiority or aesthetic superiority. We are Apple people who think differently, not Microsoft types who are conformists. That’s a strong way of addressing employees and also a strong way of addressing customers in order to make them feel that this is more than an employment choice or a consumer choice, but it’s a defining identity.

CURT NICKISCH: Let’s briefly walk through the three tribal instincts that you write about in your book. What are the peer instinct, the hero instinct, and the ancestor instinct?

MICHAEL MORRIS: These are the three major waves of genetic evolution that revolutionized our psychology and enabled new forms of social organization. The first wave is what I call the peer instinct, and this started about 2 million years ago when our ancestor homo erectus was still the form of human that dominated. And this enables coordination, coordinated activity in groups, like a hunting party or collaborative gathering.

It is economically more efficient to forage collectively than to forage each individual for him or herself. And the ability to do that was a real revolution. We can recognize this instinct in ourselves today. It’s our sideways glance at classmates, coworkers, neighbors, our impulse to match what the other people alongside us are doing to mesh with other people, to meld minds and harmonize our actions. And it’s often derided as conformity. It does at times reduce our independent thinking, reduce our individual creativity, but it enables collective-level thinking, building on the ideas of other people working on a problem together, and that is what distinguishes our species.

Chimps are very inventive, but they’re not very collaborative. They can’t collaborate on anything, even moving a log. It’s our ability to collaborate, to work in concert, that has enabled almost everything humans do. So it’s this conformist tendency that’s the foundation of human culture, human organization, human collaboration.

CURT NICKISCH: Now, the hero instinct, what about that?

MICHAEL MORRIS: The hero instinct is a new suite of adaptations of motivational drives and cognitive capacities that appeared about a half million years ago when our forbearer Homo heidelbergensis was the dominant species. What started appearing in the archeological record around this time was they were able to hunt large game like wooly mammoths, which had not been possible to hunt before, and required that a lead hunter took on an individual risk, made an individual sacrifice for the good of the group to stun the beast before others could rush in. It was pro-social activity. It’s around the time when tool making went to a different level of refinement that required one person to toil in obscurity for a long period of time to delay gratification so that the group had this better spear or this better fishing net.

These are all examples of behaviors that come out of a drive to behave not just normally, which is the peer instinct, but normatively to make an exemplary contribution, to distinguish oneself and to gain esteem from the group. And it’s non-trivial to know what it is that is valuable to the group. And so we evolved heuristics for learning that by looking automatically to the members of the group who have the highest social status. And nowadays, that might be marked by a corner office or a fancy car, but it is something that we can read non-verbally because attention is the currency of prestige. And in a small community, we can see which individuals get the most positive attention from the most other people and we can compute a status ordering just on that basis.

Once we had this capacity for status hierarchies rather than just dominance hierarchies that other species tend to have as social organization, then people were learning from those with brains, not just brawn. They were learning from the experts at toolmaking or experts at diplomacy or whatever it was. So, that’s the hero instinct. We learn from the cultural heroes and we strive to be heroes, and it’s good for the individual because they gain status and tribute, and it’s really good for the community.

CURT NICKISCH: And finally, the ancestor instinct?

MICHAEL MORRIS: The ancestor instinct, it’s the orientation to learn from the ways of prior generations. It started showing up in the last 100,000 years when we see evidence that groups would enter a cave where there were paintings from previous humans thousands of years before. And instead of behaving like Hollywood cavemen who would be afraid and would roll a rock in front of the cave opening, they instead reacted with reverence.

They made return visits to the cave. They studied the technique of drawing, and then they extended the project of painting that cave. And so the orientation to learn from these material traces of prior generations, the orientation to pay attention to what the elders are saying.

What’s quite interesting about this form of social learning that evolved as part of the ancestor instinct is that it tends to involve rote learning. It tends to involve a leap of faith where we see something like cave drawings. We have no notion of what might be the practical value of it, but we think that it should be maintained nonetheless.

This turns out to be really valuable for practical things because it means that there may be, for example, a tradition of canoe building in a group and then we have a mini ice age and there’s no need for canoes for a couple of generations. Well, they keep building the canoes because that’s what their forefathers and foremothers did, and it keeps the expertise alive. It creates tribal memory in a way that didn’t exist before.

CURT NICKISCH: How do these instincts and these tribal attributes then show up in work culture?

MICHAEL MORRIS: Well, if you think about corporate cultures, they involve shared habits, often tacitly shared habits. They correspond to what an old timer might say to a newcomer is how we do things around here. When you’re showing someone the ropes, you’re like, “This is where we make coffee, but nobody gets coffee before 10:00 A.M. It’s not a rule, but it’s just the way we do things around here.” And it allows you to mesh with other people and meet the expectations of other people and have people understand your intentions and be seen as a person who gets it right, who’s on the same page.

CURT NICKISCH: That’s the peer instinct shining through there.

MICHAEL MORRIS: That’s the peer instinct. And then the hero instinct is essential to any corporate culture because you don’t explicitly teach the corporate culture. There may be a new employee orientation where you give some basics, but you want the corporate culture to be largely organic. And the way that it’s transmitted is that the people with clout, not necessarily the COO or the CEO, but the engineer who’s been around a long time and everyone knows they have more patents than anyone else and that they designed the chip that made the company famous. When they speak up at a meeting, people listen. And if they decide they’re going to keep using their Mac when other people are switching to PC, then other people will emulate that. So these high-status cultural heroes, heroes of the corporate culture, are agents of socialization that work much more effectively than any HR department to transmit the important cultural lessons to the next generation.

Companies that are smart, when they’re engaged in deliberate cultural change, they will often say, “Oh, well, let’s appoint a multifunctional task force or a multi-divisional task force of people to study the problem and make a recommendation.” And they often are very careful about choosing individuals from each organizational unit who have clout, who have high status, who are admired by their local peers. And then those people are of a committee that comes up with a recommendation for the new strategic direction. And then they’re usually charged with informing the rest of the organization, and the message comes across better than if it was announced by the CEO who most employees feel rather distant from, and they may feel like the CEO doesn’t know what it’s like where they work on the front lines.

CURT NICKISCH: We think of cultures as being pretty static and this is the existing culture, but you point out that cultures are constantly shifting and they are malleable. And there is a lot of power on a team leader’s part, on an organizational leader’s part to change things. What is your advice for leaders and managers who want to build a more cohesive team or change the direction of their team or their department?

MICHAEL MORRIS: I don’t know how this myth got started that culture is changeless and unchangeable. It’s just not the case. I’m old enough to have lived in many decades, and the way that we conduct meetings today is completely different from how we conducted meetings 10 years ago. Culture is constantly evolving and it changes in the short term because it fluctuates situationally. Each individual has many cultural identities. They’ve internalized many tribes, and all of those tribes can’t operate at once.

So we have what goes under the name popularly these days as code switching, sometimes called frame switching, which is that when you enter a situation, there are cues in social situations that tell us the cultural expectations. And they don’t tell us at a conscious level. They trigger us. They bring certain cultural programs to the fore of our mind.

And so, one important tool for managers and that savvy managers have always used is understanding how the workplace or the different parts of the workplace contain certain cultural cues that bring certain identities and certain habits sets and certain ideals and certain traditions to the fore, knowing that you can be an architect of those situations in order to dial up or dial down particular cultural identities.

Within any organization, you may have the organizational culture as a whole, and that is triggered by the office. It’s why companies today are doing return to office because they realize that during work from home, individual productivity may have gone up, but coordination went down because coordination happens through peer codes, which are triggered by the office.

But the same managers know that if we want to rethink our strategy, we should hold an offsite in some very different environment where these conventions of the organizational culture are not going to be top of mind and employees are going to be able to envision completely different ways of interacting and completely different business models.

So the office is a powerful cue and it is something that has positive features for creating coordination and collective action, but it can also be limiting. Even within the office, there may be different spaces that bring to mind different identities. If you want the engineers to give you their occupational culture, the real engineer thinking rather than thinking like managers, well, meet with them in the design shop and meet with them where they’re building the prototypes, and their engineering identity will be prepotent.

CURT NICKISCH: Yeah. Let’s talk a little bit more about changing organizational culture. In the book, you explained that a lot of that organizational change or transformation happens by breaking the culture down from the top and then building it back up from the bottom. Explain how that works in this context of tribalism.

MICHAEL MORRIS: If using situational cues is the short-term approach to managing culture, the longer-term approach to molding a culture is learning the social signals that update people’s cultural codes. A lot of cultural codes are the collective self-concept. A team’s sense of itself. And the way that that changes is often through putting a team through different social experiences than they have experienced in the past, such that over time they update their collective sense of how we do things around here, who we are, what we care about.

Now, in the business world, we know a lot about organizational change because we often try to engage in these very ambitious transformational changes where we have an old corporation that has outlived the things that they were competent at, and the leaders want to completely reinvent it, to bring it into the present age and make it competitive.

And that’s challenging for many, many reasons. And they fail because a lot of the middle managers are invested in the status quo. They’re invested in the ways of doing things that have gotten them ahead. And especially when you have an outsider CEO come in with a new vision, there’s often a sense that the outsider CEO is tone-deaf and doesn’t get it, so there’s active resistance to deliberate organizational change initiatives.

That doesn’t mean they’re impossible. These transformational change initiatives, they have to deal with changing culture at multiple levels. So usually when you’re making a deep change, there are some shared habits that need to be changed through the psychology of the peer instinct. There are some shared ideals or values that need to be changed through the psychology of the hero instinct. And there are some shared traditions and institutions that need to be changed through the psychology of the ancestor instinct.

We all know about the logic of bottom-up change through a grassroots strategy. But when you’re making really strong changes in an organization where there’s a lot of commitment to the status quo, you often have to do what the great psychologist Kurt Lewin called unfreezing before you can do refreezing. The methods that many consulting companies have developed and many Harvard Business School professors have developed for thinking about managed change, there are many such change models, but what I try to show is that they are all derivative of Kurt Lewin’s basic two-part structure. And in that first part, what you see is a breaking of the old system. And that breaking tends to happen top-down, starting with leaders acting decisively, and then it has to be followed by a bottom-up process of building something new.

And so for the most challenging kinds of managed change, you essentially have a two-part process, both of which are different kinds of cultural change. And the tools that I talk about related to these three tribal instincts, the triggers of the tribal instincts and the signals that update the tribal instincts, are relevant to each of those steps.

CURT NICKISCH: What would you advise leaders who are a little bit afraid of tribalism? You can look at leaders who’ve been struggling in the last few years with trying to handle people with different political opinions at the office or feeling like they have to make a public comment about big news events. Some of them are scared like that. They would rather just stay neutral. What do you advise a team leader or manager or organizational leader who’s afraid of the power of tribalism? What would you tell them to embrace the good parts of it without being scared by the negative?

MICHAEL MORRIS: Corporate leaders, like university leaders, often prefer a policy of institutional neutrality, that they are not going to speak on a topic. And many of them are skittish about allowing organized demonstrations of beliefs by employees or students about political issues. But I think tribalism is the only human nature we have, and what we have to do is think about how to orchestrate constructive tribal expression, rather than destructive tribal expression. And I think we can look to the corporations and to the campuses where the concerns about the Israel-Gaza conflict have played out as teachable moments as opposed to the campuses, like my own, where it became quite destructive. It went in directions that nobody was learning from.

I think some of those lessons are preventing the groups from being co-opted by outside groups that are more extremist. It’s paying very close attention to the role of symbols in inflaming and polarizing these group activities. For example, on the Rutgers campus, one of the critical negotiations that led to a very productive solution was flag parity. There had been, for whatever reason, because of some exchange programs, a number of Israeli flags flown on the campus, but no Palestinian flags. And so the protesters said, “We just want flag parity on the campus,” which may seem superficial, but it’s an important symbol. It means a lot to people.

Another thing is ceremonies. Ceremonies may seem innocuous, but they are intoxicating. They affect people. They change people’s psychology, at least temporarily, from one of critical thinking to one of solidarity and sometimes absolutist commitment. And so the ceremonies that we sometimes see, marches, vigils, et cetera, we have to be careful about those. And organizational leaders are probably better served by permitting ceremonies in the form of panel discussions, debates, teach-ins, because these are equally committed events, but they are events that spur critical thinking in the marketplace of ideas rather than spurring us-them thinking in the negative, pernicious way.

CURT NICKISCH: Michael, thanks so much for coming on the show to talk about this.

MICHAEL MORRIS: Thank you so much for having me.

CURT NICKISCH: That’s Michael Morris, a professor at Columbia Business School and the author of the new book, Tribal: How The Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together.

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