Stanford Breaks Down How to Be Popular in 2 Easy Steps
Stanford Graduate School of Business recently published an article by Eilene Zimmerman on a new paper about how successful employees tend to toe the line between fitting in and standing out in the work place. In “Fitting In or Standing Out? The Tradeoffs of Structural and Cultural Embeddedness” GSB professor Amir Goldberg, linguistics professor Christopher Potts, and UC Berkeley coauthor Sameer Srivastava explore “that tension and find ways to resolve it.”
Goldberg explains the conundrum: “No one wants to be perceived as average or replaceable, especially in tech companies that value innovation, diversity, and creativity.” At the same time, “Fitting in creates a larger, motivating sense of identity for employees and enables them to be productive members of the organization.”
Goldberg and his team used a “mid-sized tech company’s e-mail archive between 2009 and 2014” as a data set to “closely examined the structure and pattern of email interactions to learn more about small, tight-knit cliques within the organization.”
Goldberg elaborates: “We wanted to look at language that reflected cultural style and the level of cultural alignment, not language that referred only to a job’s function or the industry.”
The key conclusion from the research was that employees can be “characterized by their levels of cultural and structural ‘embeddedness,’ meaning how integrated they are within the larger organizational structure and smaller network cliques. This “embeddedness” can be broken down into “four organizational archetypes,” according to the article:
- “Doubly embedded” refers to someone who is “both culturally compliant and part of a dense network.” Picture that “geeky software engineer who is part of his tight little team, but doesn’t interact outside that group.” This archetype is over “three times more likely to be fired than integrated noncomformists.”
- “Disembedded” refers to someone who “isn’t part of any one group and doesn’t fit in culturally either.” Picture that person at the company party who absentmindedly talks your ear off. This archetype, according to Goldberg, is “most likely to lose their job.”
- “Integrated nonconformists” refer to people “who are part of a tight-knit group but still stand out culturally.” Picture the employee who “wears an ironic, vintage button-down shirt rather than a T-shirt with the company logo.”
- “Assimilated brokers” are the “ultimate networkers,” according to Goldberg. “She is well-connected across the firm but not really a part of any one group, yet she blends in culturally, speaking and dressing the same as everyone else.”
If you’re the fashion-forward type (see: bowties), Goldberg suggests that you will “need to fit into your organization structurally by being part of a tight-knit group of colleagues.” If you tend to be a social butterfly, “you better fit in culturally and ditch the bowties.”
Goldberg concludes with some simple advice on maintaining the right balance: “Either maintain your place as part of a tight-knit group but stand out by behaving a little weirdly, or be the smooth networker who knows what’s going on across the organization but also knows how to blend in culturally.”
About the Author
Jonathan Pfeffer
Jonathan Pfeffer joined the Clear Admit and MetroMBA teams in 2015 after spending several years as an arts/culture writer, editor, and radio producer. In addition to his role as contributing writer at MetroMBA and contributing editor at Clear Admit, he is co-founder and lead producer of the Clear Admit MBA Admissions Podcast. He holds a BA in Film/Video, Ethnomusicology, and Media Studies from Oberlin College.
