Great article last week in The Wall Street Journal on “What Gives Social Norms Their Power.” The research doesn’t have direct implications to HR, but you can derive much out of not just how social norms/the unspoken rules of a group, shape not just behavior but also the attitudes of your employees.

From The Wall Street Journal:

These are examples of how individuals’ behavior is shaped by what people around them consider appropriate, correct or desirable. Researchers are investigating how human behavioral norms are established in groups and how they evolve over time, in hopes of learning how to exert more influence when it comes to promoting health, marketing products or reducing prejudice…

The more public an object or behavior is, the more likely it is to spread, Dr. Berger says….

Rarely does any one individual set an entirely new norm for the group. Group leaders, however, help perpetuate or shift the norm. Unlike innovators, leaders tend to be high-status “superconformists,” embodying the group’s most-typical characteristics or aspirations, says Deborah Prentice, a social psychologist at Princeton University. People inside and outside the group tend to infer the group’s norms by examining these leaders’ behaviors…” Read more…