by Shona Simkin
Photo courtesy Evgenia Eliseeva.
Anjali Bhatt is an assistant professor in the Organizational Behavior Unit at Harvard Business School and teaches the first year organizational behavior course in the MBA required curriculum. We asked Anjali about her research, what it might mean for organizations and individuals, and what she likes to do in her spare time.
What is your area of research?
I research cultural change in organizations. There’s a lot of great work on understanding what organizational culture is—the types of cultures that help organizations thrive and help people feel like they belong—but far less research on how to get there—how to change culture so that it helps organizations and the people in them. I study that at both the individual and organizational level—how do individuals change their behaviors, norms, values, and beliefs, and how do organizations, which are collective groups of individuals, move from one side of behaviors and patterns and beliefs to another.
How did you get interested in cultural change?
I used to be a social impact consultant, and a lot of our work was trying to bring together multiple organizations and stakeholders around a common social need. We often found that different organizations saw the same issues differently, which became a big barrier to getting any coordinated work done. I wanted to figure out the root causes of that misunderstanding.
I don’t think I realized how prevalent this issue was—not just in the social sector, but in organizations with departments that aren’t working together well, or in mergers and acquisitions (M&A). I took a class on the sociology of culture in graduate school, and it dawned on me that it was something about people’s mental models—if we can understand how mental models are formed and evolve, and how to build bridges across different mental models, then maybe we can overcome these issues.
What are you working on currently?
As a sociologist, I tend to think in terms of large groups, but as I’ve gotten deeper into this research, I’ve become interested in understanding cultural change at the individual level—who are the instigators of cultural change? Who are people who can learn another mental model and build bridges between two different groups?
I was looking for a setting in which I could compare individuals’ behavior in the same situation and see what predicted who was going to build bridges between cultures. I was able to collect data from a merger with minimal layoffs and other external factors, so that we could compare apples to apples in terms of how different people behaved. Then I looked at who was doing this cultural bridging and bringing together different ways of communicating.
How do you go about this?
I look at how linguistic styles in employees’ emails change from before to after the merger. Linguistic style is different from the content or topics discussed and instead focuses on how these topics are communicated. These more implicit features in workplace communication—like emotions and pronouns and how assertive one is—often convey what we value and how we should behave. Are we more or less polite in our emails? Do we swear in our emails? Those types of things.
It’s quite challenging to get this kind of data from companies; it was about four years worth of work to obtain it from this particular company. One of the things that’s on my mind is ensuring that individuals’ information is appropriately protected. So I don’t actually have access to the raw text—just the linguistic measures relevant to my research question.
What did you find?
Actually, I was surprised by the results; it wasn’t entirely what I was expecting. It turns out that people who are in positions of leadership, and those who are high performers, tend not to culturally adapt as much as those who are not. Consistently, it’s the lower status, lower ranking, lower performing individuals who engage in more cultural adaptation immediately following a merger.
Right now, I’m working on explaining this finding. I can imagine two accounts: One, that people in positions of leadership have less capacity to adapt—they are so rooted in existing habits that it’s difficult to get out of them. The other category is around their motivations—that leaders are less motivated to change their behavior. I’m finding that the capability argument isn’t enough to explain the difference. There does seem to be some evidence that motivation plays a role—it’s not just that leaders are incapable of culturally adapting, in some of these situations they are less interested in adapting their behavior. I think it’s really important to figure out who is motivated to change their behavior and how we might motivate them to change their behavior.
How do you think your findings might change organizations or individual behavior?
My sense is that this is pretty different from the way that those who advise M&A and cultural transformation currently operate. I think there’s a lot of potential if we could incorporate these findings into the ways that cultural integrations are managed. Culture is unlikely to be a high priority criterion on anybody’s list for deciding whether M&A should or will happen. But once that decision is made, how do you actually implement it to get the desired cultural outcome, whether complete integration or coordinated ambidexterity? The people who are tasked with managing the bridge building effort are often chosen because they are familiar with the details of the merger or hold a leadership role. But my research shows that they may not be the best choice, so this is very likely a recommendation to consider the opposite of what a lot of integration consultant teams are probably recommending.
What do you like to do outside of work?
My favorite hobbies are probably cooking and hiking. I grew up hiking with my family during summers in Colorado. It’s always been a wonderful opportunity to clear my head and get into a state of flow and see the big picture. I feel fortunate to live in an area now where we have so much access to mountains and nature, even though I probably don’t get out there as much as I like. On a day-to-day basis, cooking has become the thing that allows me to focus and center. My two-year old son is also obsessed with cooking, he’s always keen for us to cook what he calls “fresh food” rather than eat leftovers! One of the things he really likes making is pizza, and doing it together is a fun family activity these days.