The Liability of Visibility: Noticing and Overlooking Big-C and Small-C Signals during Culture Change

Organizations need cultures that support their work – sometimes this requires the culture to change. But culture is often experienced as “invisible”. Enterprise social media might enable culture change by tracing activity (posts, group formation, comments etc.), thereby making culture visible. But this visibility raises a compelling puzzle: How do leaders and followers use the cultural visibility that social media offers during change? We find that because enterprise social media makes culture visible, it makes it easy for leaders to attend to big-C changes in the culture while overlooking small-c reactions, which are also visible, that undo the change. In the end, the very thing that made social media a possible solution for cultural change was also hampering leaders from sustaining the change: visibility had become a liability.