Is Your Organisational Culture Out of Sync with its Size?

In 1887, German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies published Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (”Community and Society”), wrestling with a question that feels startlingly modern: what does it mean to be human in an industrialised world? With more than a century of the Industrial Revolution behind him, Tönnies had plenty of evidence to draw from. For me, the most fascinating thing is that what he discovered over a hundred years ago still shapes our workplaces today.

His insight was simple yet profound. Before industrialisation, work happened in rural communities where everyone knew each other. After industrialisation, work moved to cities where anonymity became the norm. This shift from small, interconnected groups to large, impersonal ones fundamentally changed how we interact, communicate, and collaborate.

Consider the ripple effects. In a small group, personality type matters less. Whether you’re quiet or outspoken, people know your strengths, understand your communication style, and can tap into your expertise. But scale that group up? Suddenly the outspoken person commands the room while the quieter one must work twice as hard to be heard. The structures that worked beautifully for ten people start creating barriers at a hundred.

This dynamic extends beyond the workplace. Benedict Anderson, writing almost a century later, saw that our ability to imagine ourselves as part of a vast, faceless collective – for example, as city-dwellers - gave rise to the modern nation-state itself. We belong to communities of people we’ll never meet, bound together by a shared, imagined identity rather than personal connection.

Here’s what makes this relevant now: most organisations don’t consciously consider whether they operate as a small group or a large one, and that oversight costs them. The tools, processes, and structures that foster inclusion and productivity in a tight-knit team can actually hinder them in a larger organization and vice versa.

Over the coming weeks, I’ll explore how understanding Tönnies’ ideas can help solve some of our modern workplace challenges. We’ll examine what differentiates small-group culture from large-group dynamics, and more importantly, how understanding your organisation’s size can help you start to improve your culture.

These are just my thoughts. I’ve not done any experiments to back them up, just loads of observing over the years. Consider this series as a prompt to think about what you see around you - does it apply?