By Dr Leandro Herrero
For years, organizations talked about culture while quietly distrusting how culture actually works. The result was not confusion, but a persistent blind spot — one that shaped how behaviour was managed, influenced, and misunderstood.
For decades, management spoke endlessly about culture while quietly mistrusting the very forces through which culture actually forms. This was not a lack of tools or good intentions. It was a deeper conceptual failure — one that shaped how organizations were designed, led, and “changed.”
Culture, we were told, was about values, leadership, alignment, and purpose. Yet the most powerful drivers of behaviour — imitation, peer influence, and social pressure — were treated as suspicious, juvenile, or ethically questionable. Something fundamental was missed.
Not accidentally, but systematically.
The respectable blind spot
Traditional management thinking was built on a narrow image of the human being: rational, individual, motivated by incentives, guided by leaders. This made hierarchy respectable and lateral influence uncomfortable.
Influence was acceptable when it flowed downwards — from leaders, from strategy, from formal authority. The same influence, when it flowed sideways, was treated with moral unease. “Peer pressure” sounded childish, manipulative, even dangerous. Something associated with playgrounds and adolescent conformity had no place in the adult world of organizations.
This moral framing mattered. By labelling peer pressure as something negative, management effectively disqualified one of the most powerful forces shaping behaviour — while pretending to address culture through speeches, training, and leadership programmes.
Culture was discussed. Social contagion was not.
The mislabelling of peer pressure
Peer pressure is not an anomaly. It is how norms are enforced in every human group that has ever existed.
What people wear, how they speak, how they work, what they tolerate, what they challenge — these are not primarily dictated by formal authority. They are stabilised through observation, imitation, and the subtle rewards and sanctions of belonging.
In organizations, peer pressure is already operating all the time. The only real question is whether it is left unmanaged or deliberately shaped.
Yet management treated peer pressure as something to be minimised rather than understood. Leadership was expected to “override” it. Values were expected to “counteract” it. Training was expected to “correct” it.
None of this worked because it misunderstood the nature of the force involved.
Leadership does not eliminate peer pressure. It only decides whether it operates blindly or deliberately.
Homo Economicus meets Homo Imitans
Much of management theory rests on an outdated anthropology: Homo Economicus — the idea that people primarily act as independent, rational decision-makers responding to incentives and instructions.
But humans are, above all, Homo Imitans. I dedicated a whole book to this.
We learn by copying. We calibrate behaviour by watching others. We adjust not to formal rules, but to what is normalised around us. This is not weakness or lack of originality; it is the primary mechanism through which social systems function.
By ignoring imitation, management tried to change behaviour without changing exposure. It focused on what people were told, rather than what they saw repeated. It invested in individual mindsets while neglecting collective patterns.
Culture change was designed as instruction, when it should have been understood as contagion.
The leadership displacement
The obsession with leadership that emerged in the late twentieth century can be seen, in retrospect, as a displacement activity.
Leadership became the respectable way to talk about influence without addressing the uncomfortable reality that most influence does not come from leaders at all. It comes from peers. From role models without titles. From what is rewarded informally, not declared formally.
This is not an argument against leadership. It is an argument against asking leadership to compensate for a flawed understanding of social dynamics.
No amount of leadership development can substitute for unmanaged peer norms. No vision statement can compete with everyday imitation. No cascade can override what people see their colleagues getting away with.
Culture does not follow leaders. It follows patterns.
The real failure
The failure of traditional management was not practical. It was conceptual.
It failed to take social forces seriously because they felt unruly, informal, and ethically ambiguous. It preferred clean models to messy reality. It trusted design over emergence. It valued control over contagion.
As a result, organizations kept trying to “implement” culture — and were repeatedly surprised when it behaved like a living system instead.
Ironically, many organizations did change. But not because management finally understood culture. They changed despite management — through informal networks, peer reinforcement, and imitation operating below the radar.
The tragedy is not that peer pressure exists. It is that management refused to name it, understand it, and work with it.
The uncomfortable inheritance
If there is a lesson here, it is not methodological. It is philosophical.
To take culture seriously requires taking social influence seriously — without moralising it, romanticising it, or pretending it can be replaced by leadership rhetoric. It requires accepting that behaviour spreads laterally far more than vertically, and that control is weaker than example.
Until management makes peace with this, culture will remain something it talks about fluently — and shapes accidentally.
The force that changes culture was never missing. It was simply distrusted.
Dr Leandro Herrero
