Concurrents – Environmental Psychology: Tight and Loose Cultures – What Designers Need to Know

by Robert Beck | December 3rd, 2018

Since Michelle Gelfand published her book (Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World) earlier this year – and it was reviewed by The New York Times (Neil Gross, “Is Your Culture ‘Tight’ or ‘Loose’? The Answer Could Explain Everything,” September 14, 2018, (nytimes.com/2018/09/14) – people have been talking about “tight” and “loose” cultures. What do the professionals who design and manage workplaces need to know about tight and loose cultures? In a 2011 article written with 44 collaborators, Gelfand defines tight cultures as those that “have many strong norms and a low tolerance of deviant behavior” and loose ones as having “weak social norms and a high tolerance of deviant behavior.” Before you start to think that this article may be about something it’s not, I feel it’s necessary to state that by “deviant” Gelfand means “not conforming to social norms.” Gelfand and her many …