Cultural Learning by Hiring New Leaders: Perpetuating Effect of Cultural Tightness in Groups

Abstract

Organizational cultures form the social fabric of employees’ work lives. How employees respond to transitions, whether leaving an organization to join a new one as a leader, or receiving a new leader from outside of the organization, has important implications for an organization’s culture and work group cultures. With multi-wave and multi-source data collected from 372 employees in 91 work groups of a single firm, our study examined an organization’s cultural learning by hiring new leaders. In other words, group leaders were hired from outside, essentially newcomers to the organization, while group members were organizational insiders. We found that new groups acquired the culture of their leaders’ former groups; cultural tightness that leaders experienced in their former groups had enduring effects on the culture of their new groups, which in turn influenced negative and positive deviant behavior of members in these groups. The effects were stronger when the leaders identified or had longer tenures with their former groups. On the other hand, the effects disappeared when group identification or tenure with the former groups were low.