ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE Organizational Culture and Leadership, 3rd Edition

4HOW CULTURE EMERGESIN NEW GROUPSIn Chapter Three, I illustrated how to think about and describe culturein organizations; in Chapters Twelve and Thirteen, I will describehow leaders create and embed culture as organizations formand grow. However, culture is also created in the interactions wehave with others in our normal day-to-day life, and the best way todemystify the concept of culture is first of all to become aware ofculture in our own experience, to perceive how something comesto be shared and taken for granted, and to observe this particularly innew groups that we enter and belong to. We bring culture with usfrom our past experience but we are constantly reinforcing that cultureor building new elements as we encounter new people and newexperiences.The strength and stability of culture derives from the fact thatit is group based—that the individual will hold on to certain basicassumptions in order to ratify his or her membership in the group.If someone asks us to change our way of thinking or perceiving, andthat way is based on what we have learned in a group that we belongto, we will resist the change because we will not want to deviatefrom our group even if privately we think that the group iswrong. This process of trying to be accepted by our membership andreference groups is unconscious and, by virtue of that fact, verypowerful. But how does a group develop a common way of thinkingin the first place?To examine how culture actually begins—how a group learns todeal with its external and internal environment and developsassumptions that then get passed on to new members—we need to63