It’s often been said that to innovate requires a level of thought diversity that lends organizations to embrace the misfits and oddballs among us, as it’s those people who will see the world in such a different way as to drive change and innovation.
Alas, whilst this ideal world sounds great, I’m sure we can all agree that standing out in such a way is often rather perilous, and can often seriously curtail your career progression.
A recent study suggests that choosing whether to stand out or fit in can often depend on where you sit in the structure of your organization, and the degree of cultural alignment between you and the firm.
Fitting in or standing out
For instance, if culturally you stand out from your colleagues, then if you want to succeed you will need to integrate well with the structure of your organization. Alternatively, if you’re not a part of well established groups at work, then you will need to have stronger cultural fit with your colleagues.
“Most people recognize that, if they fail to differentiate themselves from their peers, they are very unlikely to get ahead,” the authors say. “Yet fitting into a company creates a larger, motivating sense of identity for employees and enables them to collaborate with others in the organization.”
This creates a conflict whereby we simultaneously try and fit in whilst also trying to stand out. The researchers analyzed the language of internal emails between employees, with the aim of using the language of those emails as a guide to our cultural integration. In other words, if our style of email matched our peers, then employees were well integrated.
“Some of the most informative language categories were ones whose use is governed by cultural norms — for example, using emotional language when communicating with colleagues. People who fit in culturally learned to understand and match the linguistic norms followed by their colleagues,” the authors say.
When this was then correlated with employee movements (both within the organization but also comings and goings), four key types of employee emerged:
- doubly embedded actors are employees who are both part of a dense network of employees but also culturally compliant. These people are so entwined that they are unlikely to ever be innovators. What’s more, they are also much more likely to be given the chop.
- assimilated brokers were found to be the most effective. Such employees had a high level of cultural fit, with low levels of network cliqueness.
- integrated nonconformists are the opposite, and these employees also did well in the workplace
- disembedded actors are the worst of all worlds, being out of synch with the organization and also out of the key networks
“The assimilated broker has connections across parts of the organization that are otherwise disconnected. At the same time, she knows how to blend in seamlessly with each of these groups even if they are quite different culturally,” the authors say.
So, the key appears to be to try and both stand out and fit in at the same time, albeit in slightly different ways. If you can manage to conform culturally whilst also bridging between groups, then you may achieve considerable success.
