What evolutionary psychology tells us about building organisational culture

After reaching a certain number of employees, many companies find it difficult to collaborate and innovate effectively, these two items regularly featuring high in a CEOs’ list of organisational priorities. Today we see what insights evolutionary psychology has in resolving this challenge, and what leaders can do to enhance their cultures as a result.

Groupish humans

As a company grows, leaders find themselves focusing more and more not simply on delivering results, but on the relationships that support those results. But – as studies in evolutionary psychology have shown – there is only so much a person can do to manage their relationships effectively in today’s fast-paced, fast-moving and diverse organisations.

Social Brain Theory offers by far the best explanation as to why humans have been able to evolve as part of large groups, thus giving them a significant advantage in just about any ecosystem they find themselves in. As Yuval Hariri has shared in his super book Sapiens, if you put a single human in any hostile environment the human would be toast. But with a hundred humans, there is pretty much no species on the planet that could survive us. In short, our ability to co-ordinate as part of large groups has given us a major advantage wherever we choose to go.

What enables this? Well, for one thing, the development of our brains into the most hypersocial species on the planet has helped, for another, the ability to remember more information about our peers than any other species has helped create a superpower.

But there are limits. And these limits relate to how we can run companies today.

The limits of groupishness

As it turns out, the human brain has been found really only to be able to maintain 150 meaningful relationships in total (this is also called Dunbar’s Number, after the scientist who calculated it). So if we’re a typical working adult, once friends and family have been accounted for this means we might only be able at best to tend to 80 or so relationships within an organisation. Have a look:

So when an organisation grows above 100 employees, the CEO is really going to struggle to maintain the influence they want, which is why they need processes in place in order to scale further.

But processes alone aren’t enough. Attention also needs to be paid to the company’s culture.

When cultures turn Toxic

Did I mention we are hypersocial? Well, this hypersociality should not be confused with being prosocial. This mistake is often made within organisations, with the mistaken belief that people will always be ‘good’ or (choose your adjective) productive, effective and so on. Employees are at any given time in any number of emotional states and places, sometimes not beneficial to a company.

Take a look around the world right now and you will see examples of cultures which have turned bad very fast – and no one quite knows how this happens. Venezuela is one society that has gone from being warm, friendly and welcoming to one where there is no trust even of neighbours, and where life is very dangerous indeed – all in the space of under ten years.

There are plenty of examples of cultures that are toxic, indeed MIT Sloan ran a big feature on this not so long ago.[1] While it is not easy to measure toxicity, some surveys claim that as many of half of us experience toxic behaviour in the workplace. This is hardly going to be a great seedbed for collaboration let alone innovation.

What early American Settlers tell us about developing sustainable cultures

Does evolutionary psychology have any pointers with regard to this, too?

It turns out it may well do.

One major difference found between the social groups among early American settlers that sustained and those that fell apart was that the survivors had shared and costly beliefs, whereas those that did not last were only transactional in nature. We can see this in the graphic below, taken from Robin Dunbar’s 2016 book Human Evolution:

Does this have parallels with modern organisational culture? This does seem to be the case. Often poor or toxic cultures are those where leadership is transactional, whereas healthier cultures are transformational. Thus, many companies’ cultures fall with the red box in the graphic above.

Values as glue - How to create a sustainable organisation

Now we’ve seen that our brains can only manage 80 or so professional relationships. And we’ve seen that without ‘costly beliefs’ human social groups tend to collapse.

The shared and costly beliefs early American settlers used was that of religion. Obviously, this is not a way forward for companies today. However they can create shared and costly beliefs via their values. Values are thus like the glue that binds people together as a company scales, relationships grow further apart and less time is available to tend to them.

But those values need to be lived. Look on Glassdoor company profiles and you will usually see the lowest score of all ratings is in the ‘senior leadership’ category. We’ve seen in a previous post how important this is.

In a future post, I will share how you can deliberately and decisively turn around your company’s culture. Meantime, please feel free to post your thoughts in the comments below….

?

[1] MIT Sloan 2022 - Why Every Leader Needs to Worry About Toxic Culture

?