How Tribalism Can Actually Strengthen Workplace Culture

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 1 October 2024

⏱️ 29 minutes

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Summary

We live in a world that seems more divisive and polarized than ever, and it’s common to describe this phenomenon as tribalism. But Michael Morris, professor at Columbia Business School, says that term is often misunderstood and that tribal instincts can in fact be very positive influences in society and at work. He uses the lens of cultural psychology to explain the deep-seated instincts behind the human need to join and identify as a group. And he breaks down how team managers and organizational leaders can leverage tribal instincts in positive ways strengthen workplace culture. Morris is the author of the new book Tribal: How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the HBO Ideacast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Kurt Nickish.
0:17.0	Us versus them is a powerful concept. On the one hand, it's enormously useful
0:28.0	in business competition and winner-take-all markets and on other hand, it can prove very divisive when we talk about
0:36.0	polarization in society today or the sense of opposition and internal conflict that organizational
0:42.4	leaders grapple with, us versus them can be very
0:46.1	self-defeating. In all kinds of spheres, it feels like it has become an us versus them world, whether you're on the same team or not.
0:56.7	Today's guest studies social psychology and behavioral economics, and he's thought deeply
1:02.3	about the ways that tribalism is ingrained in us humans.
1:06.7	He says that our need to belong to tribes doesn't always have to be a bad thing, that understanding
1:12.4	the ways that we connect with each other can actually
1:14.8	go a long way to improve organizations.
1:18.2	Michael Morris is a professor at Columbia Business School and the author of the new book Tribal,
1:23.9	how the cultural instincts that divide us can help bring us together.
1:28.1	Hi Michael.
1:29.3	Hello, thank you so much for having me. Can we start with the term tribes and tribalism? I think it would be helpful
1:46.7	before we talk about it in the context of work culture just to understand it more
1:51.0	anthropologically. What is a tribe? Well a tribe is a large
1:57.1	community that is bound together by shared ideas,
2:03.0	routines, shared traditions.
2:06.0	To an evolutionary biologist or to a behavioral scientist,
2:11.0	a tribe is the distinctive human form of social organization.
2:16.4	It allows for communities that are much larger than other primates are capable of because it allows us to transcend
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