Against the current: Cultural psychology and culture change management

Abstract

Since the 1980s, psychologists and management scholars have contributed significantly to the popularity of the idea of culture in organizations. A common and tenacious pitfall surrounding this idea, at times pointed out by these scholars themselves, is that culture is too often hypostatized and superimposed upon people. In doing so, this can have harmful consequences for employees at every level of organization. In this article, we reiterate this critique, challenge familiar managerial notions used to address “shared” behavior among employees, and answer to an old but neglected call to bring back real people to the forefront of our analyses. Based upon our adaptation of the enactive approach to the social tuning of behavior developed by Paul Voestermans and Theo Verheggen—made applicable in empirical studies on culture change conducted by the first author of this article—and inspired by principles of Gestalt, we propose a novel heuristic model to address organizational culture change. We attempt to do so both from an analytical and interventionist standpoint, while avoiding attributing causality to the idea of culture.