Case Study 01 — Jordan: Culture at Work and Within

Chapter 38: Cultural Psychology — How Culture Shapes the Mind

Background

Jordan has been building structural changes to his team and the Customer Journey Council based on insights from Chapters 35–37. The cultural psychology chapter arrives at the right moment. It gives him an additional dimension for understanding patterns he had been seeing in his team — and it invites a deeper look at the cultural assumptions embedded in the leadership frameworks he has been absorbing since his first management role.

He read the chapter over two evenings, annotating heavily, and came to the team dynamics material with a specific question: Why had his structural changes (the pre-meeting input process, the rotating challenger role) benefited some team members dramatically more than others?

The Team Pattern

Jordan spent a Thursday morning doing what he was now calling a "team dynamics audit" — reviewing participation patterns across the previous quarter's Council sessions using the pre-meeting input documents and his own session notes.

The pattern was clear once he saw it: the team members who had contributed the most during the new pre-meeting written input process, but the least during the in-session verbal discussion, were clustering around a dimension he hadn't named before. Several of them had grown up in East Asian or South Asian cultural contexts, or came from family backgrounds with higher power-distance orientations than the dominant corporate culture.

The pre-meeting written input had unlocked a significant amount of thinking that was not reaching the room verbally. Rivera, reviewing the same pattern, said: "You created a format that doesn't require anyone to challenge anyone in front of the group. That worked."

Jordan thought about the independent/interdependent self-construal material. His team members with more interdependent self-orientations — for whom the relationship structure of the meeting was more salient, and for whom public challenge carried higher relational cost — were contributing substantively through the written format. The verbal discussion format had implicitly rewarded a style of engagement that was more natural for people with independent self-construals: direct, individual, not particularly concerned with face or relational harmony.

He had solved some of the groupthink problem and simultaneously solved a cultural-fit problem he hadn't fully named.

The Leadership Framework Audit

The WEIRD critique section of the chapter prompted Jordan to do something he hadn't done before: examine the leadership frameworks he had been drawing on throughout the book for their cultural assumptions.

He went back through his annotated copies of the key texts — the SDT material, the psychological safety research, the growth mindset literature, the meaning and purpose frameworks — and asked, for each: What does this assume about the self?

Self-Determination Theory assumes that autonomy, competence, and relatedness are universal psychological needs, with autonomy as particularly primary. Jordan thought about the team members for whom relatedness was clearly more primary than autonomy — who were motivated primarily by the quality of the team relationship and the shared mission, less by personal autonomy and individual achievement. He had been designing autonomy structures (giving people ownership of domains, protecting their decision-making space) that were working better for some team members than others.

The psychological safety research (Edmondson) assumed that people would speak up if they felt safe from interpersonal consequences. But for team members from high-power-distance cultural backgrounds, the concern was not primarily about interpersonal safety — it was about the appropriateness of challenging someone with more institutional authority. The two concerns look similar from the outside but require different responses.

He wrote in his learning journal: The frameworks I've been applying are WEIRD frameworks. They work better for some team members than others not because those team members are less capable or less engaged, but because the design assumptions don't match their cultural psychology as well.

The Specific Conversation with Song

Song was a data analyst Jordan had promoted from individual contributor to a lead role eight months earlier. Song had been quiet in team meetings for most of Jordan's tenure — speaking when directly asked, but rarely initiating. Jordan had interpreted this initially as adjustment to the new role, then as evidence that Song was primarily an individual contributor temperamentally.

The pre-meeting input documents changed that interpretation. Song's written contributions were substantive, precise, and often identified the sharpest analytical concerns of any team member. Song had been doing excellent thinking that the meeting format had been systematically failing to capture.

Jordan scheduled a direct conversation with Song. Not "why are you quiet in meetings" — that would be the wrong question, implying something deficient. Instead, he asked: "What kinds of thinking environments work best for you? I want to make sure we're creating the conditions for your best work."

Song's answer was honest and detailed: the written format worked because it didn't require public challenge. "In the meetings, I'm aware of who has already spoken and what they said. Disagreeing with someone's position requires me to disagree with them in the room. The written format is different — I can say the thing without it being directed at a specific person."

Jordan asked what else would help. Song mentioned: smaller group conversations before full sessions; direct invitations (not just open questions to the room); and the rotating challenger role, which Song had found liberating — "when it's my role to raise concerns, I don't have to worry about whether I'm being too critical. It's my job."

Song was now Jordan's most reliable source of analytical challenge in Council sessions. The change had not required Song to become a different person. It had required Jordan to build environments that suited more than one cultural psychology.

The Code-Switching Reflection

The chapter's material on bicultural identity gave Jordan new language for something he had been managing for most of his adult professional life.

He was Black in majority-white professional environments. He had been code-switching — adjusting his communication register, his presentation of self, his professional persona — since graduate school. He was good at it. He had, over time, developed something like dual fluency: he could operate effectively in the dominant cultural register and in the cultural context of his own community.

What the bicultural identity integration concept named was something he hadn't fully examined: his internal experience of these two contexts. Were they compatible or conflicting?

He sat with the question honestly. For most of his career, he had experienced them as somewhat conflicting — the professional register required a kind of suspension of the cultural knowledge and communication style that felt more natural in other contexts. There was energy cost in the suspension. There was also some identity distance: the professional version of Jordan was a version, not the whole.

What the chapter asked was: What would higher bicultural identity integration look like? Not the erasure of the difference, but the genuine experience of both as complementary resources rather than competing demands.

He thought about the team design work he had been doing — specifically, his explicit effort to build evaluation frameworks that didn't embed a single cultural communication style as "professionalism." He thought about the conversation with Song. He thought about Rivera's observation that the team members seen as "leadership material" had historically communicated in one register.

He was, in small ways, building a team environment where his own cultural knowledge was directly relevant and valued — where the understanding of how to create conditions for people with interdependent self-construals came from something he knew from the inside.

That wasn't accidental. And it wasn't a cost. It was his bicultural knowledge functioning as what it always could have been: a resource.

What Jordan Understood

The cultural psychology chapter enriched Jordan's team leadership in two specific ways.

First, it named the cultural dimension underlying the differential response to his structural changes: team members with more interdependent self-construals and higher power-distance orientations had been systematically underserved by verbal discussion formats that implicitly rewarded independent-self engagement styles. The pre-meeting input process had partly addressed this without Jordan fully understanding why. He now understood why, which allowed him to design more deliberately.

Second, the WEIRD critique invited him to hold his leadership frameworks with more cultural humility — not abandoning SDT or psychological safety research, but applying them with explicit attention to what they assume about the self and asking whether those assumptions fit all his team members equally.

The bicultural identity integration concept was more personal than professional. But it produced something professionally significant: the recognition that his own bicultural knowledge — the product of navigating between cultural contexts for twenty years — was not merely a burden to be managed but a specific perceptual resource that made him better at building for cultural diversity than leaders who had only needed to inhabit one cultural framework.

Discussion Questions

1. Jordan's pre-meeting input process solved a groupthink problem and inadvertently solved a cultural-fit problem simultaneously. What does this suggest about the relationship between structural diversity and the design of participation processes?

2. Jordan distinguishes between team members' discomfort with interpersonal risk (the standard psychological safety concern) and discomfort with challenging someone with institutional authority (the high-power-distance concern). Why do these require different responses, and how would you design for each?

3. Song describes the rotating challenger role as liberating because it removes the personal dimension from raising concerns: "It's my job." How does role assignment change the social meaning of dissent? Are there limits to this mechanism?

4. Jordan's reflection on his own bicultural identity integration — moving from experiencing the two cultural contexts as conflicting demands to recognizing his bicultural knowledge as a resource — is described as having professional significance. What specific professional advantages might bicultural knowledge produce?

5. Jordan describes a version of himself (the professional register) as "a version, not the whole." What is the psychological cost of extended code-switching, and what conditions allow for reduced need to switch?