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 collaborators report that, “Strong situations have a more restricted range of appropriate behavior, have high censuring potential, and leave little room for individual discretion. Weak situations place few external constraints on individuals, afford a wide range of behavioral options, and leave much room for individual discretion…there is much higher situational constrain in tight versus loose nations…In other words, there is much high constraint across everyday situations – including the bank, public park, library, restaurant, bus, workplace, party, classroom, and the like – in tight nations, and much lower constraint across such everyday situations in loose nations.”
Research conducted by Gelfand and her team indicates that Singapore, South Korea and India are relatively tight national cultures and that Brazil, Israel, and the Netherlands are relatively loose ones. The United States is toward the loose end of the spectrum of countries whose data are reported by Gelfand et al. in 2011.
Learning about the tightness or looseness of a group’s culture makes it easier to understand the sorts of environments in which they will feel comfortable and also provides insights into the best way to structure the process of working with them.
Michele Gelfand and 44 co-authors. 2011. “Differences Between Tight and Loose Cultures: A 33-Nation Study.” Science, vol. 332, pp. 1100-1104.
Sally Augustin, PhD, is the editor of Research Design Connections(www.researchdesignconnections.com).Research Design Connectionsreports on research conducted by social and physical scientists that designers can apply in practice. Insights derived from recent studies are integrated with classic, still relevant findings in concise, powerful articles. Topics covered range from the cognitive, emotional, and physiological implications of sensory and other physical experiences to the alignment of culture, personality, and design, among others. Information, in everyday language, is shared in a monthly subscription newsletter, an archive of thousands of published articles, and a free daily blog. Readers learn about the latest research findings immediately, before they’re available elsewhere. Sally, who is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, is also the author of Place Advantage: Applied Psychology for Interior Architecture(Wiley, 2009) and, with Cindy Coleman, The Designer’s Guide to Doing Research: Applying Knowledge to Inform Design(Wiley, 2012). She is a principal at Design With Science (www.designwithscience.com) and can be reached at sallyaugustin@designwithscience.com.