BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

Lose Those Cultural Fit Tests: Instead Screen New Hires for 'Enculturability'

This article is more than 6 years old.

Last summer, Barnes & Noble fired its CEO, Ron Boire, after less than a year. The reason? He was not a “good fit.”

These days hiring seems to be hyper-focused on the candidate’s “cultural fit.” Companies want candidates who “will reflect and/or be able to adapt to the core beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors that make up your organization.” In addition to understanding the company’s core values and mission, a new employee is expected to quickly get along with the rest of the gang. How she or he will mesh with the existing corporate culture is of utmost priority to many human resources departments as well as in the C-suite. After all, no one wants to spend all that time and energy interviewing just to later find out a top candidate is ill suited to the company’s carefully cultivated ways.

Yet, from the employee’s point of view, it often seems like the best way to climb the corporate ladder—or at least be noticed by your superiors—is by standing out from one’s peers. There are myriad tips online for ways to make oneself a star at work, and most of them include speaking up, showing personality and creatively pushing individual strengths. That’s some bewildering stuff to pack into a day at the office where you’ve been hired specifically because of your compatibility. Flawlessly fitting in while maintaining a strong sense of identity can be a real struggle.

A new study suggests that the employees who are promoted or receive favorable/strong performance ratings successfully straddle these two seemingly opposite behaviors. And the best way for an employer to make sure the company is full of people who are capable of this nimble skill is to pre-screen for something the researchers have labeled “enculturability.” Enculturability is both the propensity to change based on cultural cues and the unique ability to bridge different departments and functions.

Researchers at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley were intrigued by the idea that employees seem torn between fitting in and standing out. The team asked a mid-sized technology company for access to their internal email records. They created an algorithm that could examine the language between 601 full-time employees in 10.24 million internal email messages from 2009 to 2014. Then they reviewed how many of these employees had left the company — voluntarily and involuntarily.

The employees who best “fit in” culturally shared similar linguistic norms. The researchers determined that employees tend to fall into four organizational archetypes: “doubly embedded actors,” “disembedded actors,” “assimilated brokers” and “integrated nonconformists.” The doubly embedded actors are folks who easily conform to cliquish expectations and do not stand out as culturally distinct. Disembedded actors do not fit in at all with their peers — and can be viewed with suspicion if they suggest innovative ideas. Assimilated brokers get along with many cliques across the organization yet maintain their own distinct identity. Finally, integrated nonconformists are part of a tight-knit clique yet are eager to present unconventional ideas.

The assimilated brokers and integrated nonconformists are the most likely to achieve success, and the doubly embedded employees the least likely. According to journalist Eilene Zimmerman at Insights by Stanford Business: “Those most likely to get ahead are what [the researchers] call ‘assimilated brokers,’ meaning people who are high on cultural fit and low on network cliquishness, and their mirror images, the ‘integrated nonconformists,’ meaning people who are part of a tight-knit group but still stand out culturally.”

On the other hand, the doubly embedded employee is just a little too happy to hang with his or her department. “Think of the geeky software engineer who is part of his tight little team, but doesn’t interact outside that group,” writes Zimmerman. “He isn’t aware of what’s happening in the company as a whole and knows no more than his immediate peers. Because of that, a doubly embedded actor brings nothing new to the table.”

Most fascinating, the researchers say that the employees with the best chances of long-term success were hired with low initial cultural fit but high enculturability — that capacity to change and be flexible. Employees who are capable of evolving with the company’s culture and who are comfortable with many different groups are better off in the long run, presumably in part because they bring more value to the company.

“Our results suggest that firms should place less emphasis on screen for cultural fit,” write researchers Amir Goldberg and Sameer B. Srivastava. “As other work has shown, matching on cultural fit often favors applicants from particular socioeconomic backgrounds, leading to a reduction in workplace diversity. Instead, our work points to the value of screening on enculturability.”

The researchers suggest three enculturability questions to ask potential candidates during the hiring process:

1. To what extent do candidates seek out diverse cultural environments?

2. How rapidly do they adjust to these new environments?

3. How do they balance adapting to the new culture while staying true to themselves?

You might also consider asking future employees for concrete ways they have worked cross-functionally in the past. Ask them specifically how they were able to broaden their network beyond their initial department.

This research is both exciting and, to be honest, a bit alarming. Companies may need to reconsider how to approach their candidates in the near future to make sure all those perfect matches aren’t turning into too-cozy cliques. One promising direction is candidates see value in cultural principles, and perhaps even aspiration, even if they would not describe themselves as currently behaving in these ways.

Follow me on Twitter