Generative Organizational Culture: How Mental Fitness and Ethical Maturity Sustain It and How Coaching Helps

Every organization within its daily routines bears an answer to a question that is usually not expressed aloud: what happens here when someone faces a difficulty or a disagreement or a dilemma with no explicit solution? In a generative culture the answer is that information flows, people think together and mistakes are treated as learning material. This article explores how two human abilities, mental fitness and ethical maturity, nourish such a culture, and how coaching (see our Executive Coaching, Team Coaching and Leadership Development Coaching services) can act as a catalyst for both. It draws on organizational psychology, neuroscience and moral development theory and it closes with a hopeful proposition: the conditions that change what troubles us “out there” are cultivated in ordinary interactions, one decision at a time, by each of us for one another.

Ron Westrum (2004) described three broad cultural orientations according to the way organizations handle information. In pathological cultures, which are power-oriented, information is withheld and messengers are discouraged. In bureaucratic cultures, which are rule-oriented, information follows prescribed channels and novelty tends to create problems. In generative cultures, which are performance-oriented, information is actively sought, messengers are trained, responsibilities are shared, failure leads to inquiry and exploration and new ideas are welcomed. The typology emerged in safety-critical fields, such as aviation and healthcare, and has since informed our thinking about learning and evolving organizations more broadly.

Edgar Schein (2010) offers a complementary perspective by describing culture on three levels: visible artifacts, espoused values and basic underlying assumptions. The deepest level shapes what people actually do when pressure rises, which explains why a code of ethics on the wall can coexist with silencing in the meeting room. Amy Edmondson’s (1999) research on psychological safety, namely the shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk taking, identifies one of the most robust mechanisms through which a generative orientation becomes daily behavior: people speak up, ask questions, admit errors and experiment. I explore the relational foundations of this mechanism in Wired to connect: What that means for how we lead.

Taken together, these perspectives suggest the following working definition. A generative culture protects the quality of collective thinking at those moments when it is most at risk. Two human abilities appear to carry much of this protective load: the mental fitness of the people involved and the ethical maturity with which they reason about what matters.

A generative culture protects the quality of collective thinking at those moments when it is most at risk.

Euanthia Kourtbouyanni

Mental fitness is one’s ability to keep one’s best thinking available, when the situation is least friendly to it. In practice this means staying curious when challenged, empathic when frustrated and clear when the stakes are high. Shirzad Chamine (2012) popularized a practitioner framework, Positive Intelligence, which expresses this ability as the proportion of time the mind serves a person’s goals and relationships, a proportion that internal “saboteurs” such as the Judge, the Stickler or the Avoider for example tend to reduce.

A note on the evidence is essential at this point though: To my knowledge, peer-reviewed studies testing the Positive Intelligence framework itself remain limited. Its core ideas nevertheless resonate with several well-established research findings. Acute stress, as we have known for a while, weakens prefrontal functions that support flexible reasoning and impulse control (Arnsten, 2009). Emotion regulation strategies, particularly cognitive reappraisal, are associated with healthier psychological and social outcomes (Gross, 2015). Additionally, self-compassion is associated with greater resilience and lower reactivity to failure (Neff, 2003). Last but not least, positive emotions broaden attention and build durable personal resources (Fredrickson, 2001). Readers interested in the human side of this topic may also enjoy my piece on self-care, self-acceptance and self-compassion.

Mental fitness acquires cultural meaning, because leaders’ states propagate. Sy, Côté and Saavedra (2005) found that a leader’s mood influences the mood of group members and shapes group processes, such as coordination and effort. A team whose leader meets bad news with curiosity learns that bad news is useful information, which is precisely the information-flow signature Westrum associates with generative cultures. In this sense the inner life of a leader functions as a cultural variable.

Mental fitness is one’s ability to keep one’s best thinking available when the situation is least friendly to it.

Euanthia Kourtbouyanni

Lawrence Kohlberg (1981, 1984) described moral reasoning as developing through preconventional, conventional and postconventional levels. Neo-Kohlbergian research extended this work (Rest, Narvaez, Bebeau & Thoma, 1999) and James Rest’s (1986) four-component model adds that moral behavior requires sensitivity to the ethical dimension of a situation, sound judgment, the motivation to prioritize moral values and the character to follow through. Robert Kegan’s (1994) work on adult development adds a related insight to the above: as meaning-making matures, a person can hold a growing number of perspectives at the same time, which is precisely the ability that complex dilemmas require.

Organizations nurture this development – for better or worse. Treviño, Butterfield and McCabe (1998) showed that the ethical context of an organization, including its climate and the way codes are enforced, influences ethics-related attitudes and behaviour. Tenbrunsel and Messick (2004) described ethical fading, namely the process through which the ethical dimension of a decision disappears from view, often supported by self-deception. Bandura (1999), on the other hand, identified mechanisms of moral disengagement that allow otherwise decent people to act against their own standards. On the constructive side, Brown, Treviño and Harrison (2005) demonstrated that ethical leadership spreads through social learning, as followers observe and imitate what leaders do.

A promising approach to cultivating ethical maturity collectively is the Just Community model, developed by Kohlberg and colleagues in school settings, in which participants deliberate real dilemmas and set shared norms democratically (Power, Higgins & Kohlberg, 1989). Its translation to workplaces is an extrapolation that requires empirical testing. The underlying principle nevertheless fits the wider developmental literature: ethical maturity grows, where people are invited to reason aloud about real dilemmas in the company of others who take their reasoning seriously. For related reflections see my articles on workplace violence and harassment and the Moral Development category.

Ethical maturity grows, where people are invited to reason aloud about real dilemmas in the company of others who take their reasoning seriously.

Euanthia Kourtbouyanni

Snowden and Boone (2007) describe simple, complicated, complex and chaotic contexts. In complex contexts cause and effect become apparent mostly in retrospect, so leaders are advised to probe, sense and respond. Heifetz (1994) separates technical problems, which existing expertise can solve, from adaptive challenges, which require shifts in values, beliefs and habits and cannot be resolved by authority alone. Many of the dilemmas that organizations face carry adaptive features of this kind.

Kidder (1995) observed that the hardest ethical dilemmas pit one right against another: loyalty against truth, individual against community, short-term against long-term. Dilemmas distinguish themselves by the fact that every available option protects something worth protecting. This explains the moral intensity that so often accompanies organizational conflict and it explains the temptation to resolve conflict quickly by declaring a winner.

The role of the leader is inherently complex for one more reason: leaders act in relationship with followers who also reason, interpret and face their own dilemmas of expression and silence. Kellerman (2008) and Uhl-Bien, Riggio, Lowe and Carsten (2014) similarly show that leadership outcomes are co-produced by followers’ behaviors and perceptions. A leader who understands followership designs conditions in which a colleague can express an opposite viewpoint at low personal cost, which is the behavioural core of psychological safety. Our services on organizational coaching for violence and harassment address the other side of the same coin: what happens when expression is not safe.

Dilemmas distinguish themselves by the fact that every available option protects something worth protecting.

Euanthia Kourtbouyanni

The following sequence is a working synthesis offered as a hypothesis to be tested in practice: The nervous system under threat prioritizes defense (Porges, 2011) and prefrontal capacities weaken (Arnsten, 2009). People then tend to reason below their developmental level, defaulting to rule-following or self-protection. A (self-)regulated state, on the other hand, widens attention and perspective, which gives access to more complex moral reasoning. The decisions that follow it are visible to others. Observers learn what is valued (Brown et al., 2005), norms take form and a sense of safety grows (Edmondson, 1999). That safety in turn supports regulation in the next difficult moment – and the loop reinforces itself.

Culture can be understood as the stabilized form of many such loops repeated over time. The same logic works in reverse as well: In cultures where threat is the norm, regulation falters, reasoning narrows, ethical fading advances and the climate becomes more threatening still. This interpretation explains why interventions limited to training in ethics tend to disappoint, when the surrounding conditions keep people in defense, and why interventions limited to stress management tend to disappoint, when the surrounding conditions keep rewarding ethical shortcuts. The two abilities in question support one another and benefit from being trained and developed together.

A (self-)regulated mind gives way to a mature conscience to speak.

Euanthia Kourtbouyanni

The evidence base for coaching in organizational contexts is encouraging. A meta-analysis by Theeboom, Beersma and van Vianen (2014) found moderate to large effects of coaching on performance and skills, well-being, coping, work attitudes and goal-directed self-regulation. De Haan, Duckworth, Birch and Jones (2013) found that common factors, such as the quality of the relationship and the client’s self-efficacy, are central to outcomes, a finding I also discuss in Why the coach–client relationship is the strongest predictor of coaching effectiveness.

Transparency and candour require adding that studies examining the effect of coaching on ethical maturity itself are, to my knowledge, scarce. The mechanisms that follow are theoretically grounded inferences that require research: First, co-regulation: an attuned and calm coach helps a leader return to a regulated state, as Boyatzis, Smith and Beveridge (2013) describe compassion-oriented coaching as supporting sustained learning and well-being. Second, reflective space: a leader can think aloud about a dilemma before the dilemma speaks on its own accord through action. Third, perspective expansion: the immunity-to-change process of Kegan and Lahey (2009) points at competing commitments and hidden assumptions, which is the very structure of many dilemmas. Fourth, experimentation and accountability: small behavioral experiments translate insight into practice.

Coaching bears cultural leverage as well. Schein (2010) notes that leaders embed culture through what they pay attention to, how they react in crises and how they allocate rewards. Coaching that reaches the top of the hierarchy, therefore, cascades through every one of these channels, and Team Coaching extends the work to the collective patterns that a leader alone does not control. Last but not least, the ethical practice of coaches themselves (be it managers or not) benefits from Coach Mentoring and Supervision.

Coaching offers a safe relationship in which a leader can think aloud about a dilemma, before the dilemma speaks on its own accord through action.

Euanthia Kourtbouyanni

Culture changes at the speed of repeated, visible, ordinary choices. The following practices, grounded in the literature discussed above, offer a practical structure.

1. Leaders train their own mental fitness and make the practice visible. Naming one’s own state (“I notice I am getting defensive, let me take a moment”) models regulation for everyone present.
2. Teams hold regular dilemma dialogues. Real cases, discussed with attention to the competing goods involved, apply the Just Community principle at workplace scale.
3. Dissent receives appreciation. The first response to an unwelcome view sets the price of the next one, as psychological safety research consistently suggests.
4. Failures are examined through learning reviews. Westrum’s generative orientation treats failure as a prompt for inquiry.
5. Followership is developed explicitly. Expectations about expression, constructive challenge and support are discussed at every level.
6. Systems align with stated values. Promotion criteria, recognition and incentives that reward ethical conduct close the gap between espoused values and underlying assumptions (Treviño et al., 1998).
7. Culture is measured. Edmondson’s (1999) psychological safety scale and the ethical work climate questionnaire (Victor & Cullen, 1988) provide starting points for periodic pulse checks.

Culture changes at the speed of repeated, visible, ordinary choices.

Euanthia Kourtbouyanni

Intellectual honesty about what we do not yet know is itself a generative practice, so the limits for what I have discussed thus far have to be stated. Much of the supporting evidence is correlational or cross-sectional. Westrum’s typology originated in safety-critical industries and its transfer to other sectors requires continued testing. Evidence for the Positive Intelligence framework itself is still emerging. The Just Community model has been studied mainly in educational settings. Ethical maturity develops slowly, often across years, which makes it difficult to study within the time-frame of a typical coaching engagement. Finally, cultural context matters: distances in hierarchy, social trust and norms about expressing dissent vary across countries and sectors, and findings from one setting may apply imperfectly to another. Longitudinal studies that follow leaders and teams over time would help to refine the picture.

Intellectual honesty about what we do not yet know is itself a generative practice.

Euanthia Kourtbouyanni

Many of us look at the world “out there” and see practices we would like to change: silence around misconduct, polarization, exhaustion, decisions that serve the short term at the expense of the people involved. The perspective developed in this article, however, communicates an optimistic implication. If culture is the stabilized form of repeated interactions, then every interaction contributes to it. A leader who takes a breath before responding to bad news for example, or a colleague who voices a doubt, a team that stays with a dilemma a little longer before deciding – each of these choices alters the conditions in which the next person decides.

Coaching accelerates this process by providing a relationship in which (self-)regulation, reflection and ethical reasoning can be practiced with support. Each decision made with a regulated mind and a mature conscience becomes part of the environment, in which someone else decides next. That is how individual growth turns into collective change and it is why I remain hopeful. If you would like to explore how these ideas could be implemented in your organization, you are warmly invited to get in touch.

Each decision made with a regulated mind and a mature conscience becomes part of the environment, in which someone else decides next.

Euanthia Kourtbouyanni

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