How a team culture affects what people do. So how does a culture affect what people do? individually, we have a set of values and beliefs that we've learned, as well. It's tendencies and instincts that we were born with. So we have influences from our genetic makeup, bits about our behavior, and traits are actually encoded into our DNA. So we have that already.

We have our parents when we're growing up, we have friends, we have relatives. We're influenced by the media by what we see on television or online. We're influenced by the books we read, and the magazines we consume. All of these things will have an impact on what we do and our behavior and that goes for your team members, too. But individuals will also be influenced by other people within their team and those around them. They'll think about what they think other people are thinking, and are likely to do.

We call this theory of mind. So all human beings are constantly looking around them, thinking about what other people are thinking and what they're going to do. And that affects the behavior of individuals. And we've mentioned that culture is the sum total of all of those bits of behavior. It's completely normal to be influenced by others. So understanding how people are influenced by other people, is a well researched field.

And that's a really interesting and at times extreme results. What this research has told us is that there's a number of things that make a difference to how people are going to react and behave. What is the situation they find themselves in. So people might act quite differently in different situations. Another factor is this obedience to authority. So people will tend to do what they think is expected of them by a person or authority, conformity, peer pressure, if you like the feeling that I should do what everybody else is doing, and individual differences, which are the differences that we have in terms of tendencies and traits.

All of these factors have a part to play in what somebody is going to do and their behavior they're likely to perform. So some really interesting research. You can do some googling online to see some of this stuff. One of the most interesting pieces of research was carried out by Philip Zimbardo. Known as the Stanford Prison Experiment. So I won't go into a long description of it.

But a quick summary is that as part of an experiment on trying to understand why people did what they did, and in particular, how people could do really terrible things, really following on from a lot of research that was done after the Second World War, thinking about how could normal people actually do such terrible things. In the Nazi concentration camps. Philip Zimbardo set up an experiment where he separated a group of college students into two groups. He did this randomly. He first of all made sure there was no underlying psychological issues with them. He then separated them into prisoners and prison guards, and told them that they were part of an experiment and they had to essentially play out act out these roles.

He made it really realistic. A police car came for the individuals who were going to be the prisoners. They took them from their homes, took them into this place where they set up a mock prison. And basically they acted out this prison scene guards, prison inmates. Now what started to happen was because of the situation they found themselves in, and the instructions that were given. They started to behave not just as though they were acting, but really starting to behave as though they were those people.

And some extreme behavior started to surface, the prison guards started to behave statistically punishing the prisoners, and the prisoners started to suffer real distress. It got so bad that they had to pull the plug on the experiment a few days early because it started to become a real concern. Symbol I felt that this demonstrated that actually all sorts of people, even people that you might consider good people, nice people, normal people are capable of doing all sorts of terrible things, if you put them in that situation. So what's that got to do with organizational behavior and culture? Well, the suggestion is that even people who might want to do the right thing, may not do the right thing if they're in a situation where it's set up for them to not do the right thing. So the situation has a big part to play.

So another really interesting study was the Stanley Milgram studies. What Stanley Milgram did here is he got people in to take part in a study where he has a component where the participant would be told that this was an experiment about learning. The person telling them was dressed up to that like a doctor white coat, looking very official. Just telling them what they needed to do. And the participants were told that there was a person in another room who was wired up to some sort of electrical equipment and that they would receive shocks every time they got an answer to a question wrong. They were told it was about learning.

On this little device that the people were going to use to give electric shocks. You can see a picture of it here. They have little labels that went from mild through to potentially fatal through to triple x. And for all the world It looked like they were actually delivering electric shocks. in the other room, it was believed by the participant that there was a person receiving the shots and they could hear them screaming and shouting, asking for help telling them to stop. But they were told by the professional to carry on doing the shocks, a big percentage actually went to the highest level which was clearly labeled That could be fatal.

And yet they did it because they were told to do it by this authority figure. This was quite a shocking at the time. But again, it was trying to understand why people do what they do. The takeaway for us is that leadership, being told what to do by your manager, or your boss or other people in authority can have a big part to play in the behavior of your team. So that's another factor that we will consider about how we use this tendency to make sure that we send the right messages. And a third piece of research that's quite interesting is by Dolly and the tan, and this was really all about why it is that some people will pass and others intervene.

So there's a number of cases where people were attacked, and maybe in broad daylight and nothing stopping people intervening, but they just walked past and this goes for people. sleeping rough on the street, and perhaps other people have collapsed. And there's been a series of experiments to show that actually people will walk past until somebody intervene. So if one person intervenes, then you tend to find more come to help. So this tendency of people to just walk past is known as the bystander effect. And it's believed that the more people that are witness to a situation, the more likely this bystander effect occurs because people think, well, somebody else will sort out or do what's needed to be done.

So again, this is a tendency for people to not act when they see something wrong. Again, it's a psychological effect. And this also has impact upon organizational behavior and culture. So those three cases are very common, very well discussed within organizational change, and culture change, and they do have bearing on the sorts of things that we're going to be discussing Over these individual courses, on how to change a culture, we'll be leveraging some of these ideas as we go through these courses.