ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE Organizational Culture and Leadership, 3rd Edition

HOW CULTURE EMERGES IN NEW GROUPS 81If the group fails repeatedly, sooner or later someone will proposethat a new leadership process be found or that the original leader bereinstated in a more powerful role, and the group will find itself experimentingwith new norms of how to work with authority. It then againmust test against reality how successful it is. The norms that producethe greatest success will be the ones that survive. As they continue towork, they gradually turn into assumptions about how things reallyare. At the same time, as new norms form, there is always an immediatetest of whether the members of the group are more or less comfortableas a result of the new way of working; that is, do the newnorms enable them to avoid the anxiety inherent in the initiallyunstable or uncertain situation? If the leader is challenged, gives upsome authority, and shares power with the group, some group members,depending on their own pattern of needs and prior experiences,may feel less comfortable than before. In some groups a greater comfortlevel may be achieved by norms that, in effect, reassert the authorityof the leader and make members more dependent on the leader.The needs of the leader will also play a role in this process, so the ultimateresolution—what makes everyone most comfortable—will be aset of norms that meet the many internal needs as well as the externalexperiences. Because so many variables are involved, the resultantgroup culture will usually be a unique and distinctive one.Learning by Seeking Rewards Versus Learning to Avoid Pain.The kinds of norms—and, eventually, assumptions—that evolve outof a group’s experience will reflect whether the learning has been primarilythe result of success, or has resulted from trying to avoid inthe future some painful trauma that has happened in the past. Theway in which cultural assumptions were learned will strongly influencehow changes in that culture can be made at some later time, ifnecessary. If a group has learned primarily through positive successes,the mentality will be “Why change something that has been successful?”If a group has learned something in order to avoid pain, thementality will be “We cannot try something that has hurt us in thepast.” The implications of these differences will be explored later inthis chapter.