The Effect of Socialisation on Business

The Nature .v. Nurture debate continues – are we born destined to do behave in a certain way and with inevitable personality traits or do we develop them due to the environment in which we grow?

I suspect there is a bit of both, however we can look at the attitudes of a community/society and know with certainty that a person raised in that community will emulate these attitudes. This accounts for Cultural differences. It also accounts for the repeated behaviours through generations in a family tree. "How can someone who is a victim of abuse become an abuser?" we ask, but they were born into a community that propagated this behaviour and so the victim will unconsciously embody the same attitudes as their abusers, unless something causes them to stop, look at themselves and question their attitudes and behaviours, asking themselves "Is this correct? Is there another way of seeing things?"

In our society we believe that men and women are destined to have different personality traits eg. Women generally will be nurturing, caring and communicative and a man generally will be competitive, brave and independent. As little boys grow up we treat them differently to little girls, we teach them to be strong and not to cry, we want them to be physically active and if they fought we accept that this is part of who they are. Little girls, however are encouraged to share and not fight, we accept their tears but not so easily their anger. If a little boy is scared we may say "come on, be a big boy" but if a little girl is scared we are induced to pick her up and look after her.

These different conditionings lead to men and women displaying vastly different behaviours as adults, hence we then need books like ‘Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus’ by John Gray to help us understand and effectively communicate with each other.

We may have been born with different traits but our nurturing has also added to this by conditioning females to act and feel one way and males to act and feel another. We deny and try and hide the part of our personality that doesn’t comply with the accepted stereo-type. (Sometimes this causes psychological problems and increased misunderstanding in our male/female relationships.)

Traditionally female labelled personality traits have not been valued in business, creating business cultures that are heavily imbalanced with male traits. Some men have been denied access to this world as they don’t display enough ‘male traits’ and the women that traditionally flourished in this world were seen as being more ‘masculine’. The effect of this on the business world has been to create corporate cultures where employees have been internally competitive, not really worked well as teams and have used aggressive behaviour to get to the top.

The more male-dominated the company’s CEO and Board of Directors are, the more likely this culture has been. These companies have been driven by people who are unconsciously conditioned to not show fear, but are able to show anger, to deny and suppress their compassionate side (as being too ‘female’) and to compete to win rather than work collaboratively with colleagues.

This means that not only have key business decisions been made from an imbalanced base, but a whole swathe of society has been excluded from participating in contributing to the high performance of the business world. There is a huge pool of potential resources that are not valued and a whole section of personality traits and behaviours that are discounted. This lack of balance and reduced pool from which to choose your employees and leaders will have significantly stunted business growth.

Rebecca Watson has worked with a wide variety of Coaching Companies, organisations and leaders to empower them to deliver through high performing teams. Click to find more Coaching Articles.