You built the process for a reason. Everyone agreed to it. It’s documented, it was presented, nobody objected.

And yet.

Part of the team follows it to the letter — statuses updated, templates used, approval steps respected, every time. The other part treats it as… guidance. They skip steps when the step doesn’t seem necessary. They improvise when improvising gets a faster result. They’re not hiding it. They genuinely don’t seem to think they’ve done anything wrong.

So the stories start. The rule-followers look at the improvisers and see people who are sloppy, unprofessional, maybe even disrespectful — we all agreed to this, why do you think it doesn’t apply to you? The improvisers look at the rule-followers and see rigidity, box-ticking, people who care more about the process than the outcome — the client is happy, the work is done, what exactly is the problem?

Everyone in this story is judging character — and missing what’s actually happening.

Cultural tightness and looseness: what’s actually going on

Here’s the part almost nobody in the room knows: people don’t just carry different values into a team. They carry different assumptions about how binding a rule is in the first place.

The cultural psychologist Michele Gelfand spent years studying what she calls cultural tightness and looseness — the degree to which a cultural environment has strong, clearly defined norms and reliably enforces them. In a landmark study spanning 33 nations, her team measured how much behaviour is constrained by the situation you’re in, and how much deviation gets tolerated before there are consequences. The differences between tight and loose cultures turned out to be large, consistent, and largely invisible to the people living inside them.

In tight cultural systems, norms are strong and visible, the range of acceptable behaviour is narrow, and deviation gets sanctioned — socially or formally. People raised and socialised in tighter environments learn, deeply, that a rule is a rule. Following it is the professional behaviour.

In loose cultural systems, norms are weaker and more varied, a much wider range of behaviour is acceptable in any situation, and deviation is largely tolerated. People from looser environments learn something equally deep: rules are instruments. They exist to serve the outcome, and a sensible person adapts them when the situation calls for it.

Notice what this means for your team. When your process document says “all changes go through review before release,” a tightness-oriented team member reads a commitment. A looseness-oriented team member reads a default — the thing you do unless there’s a good reason not to. Same sentence. Two different contracts.

Both readings are coherent, internally consistent answers to the question what is a rule for? — answers each person absorbed long before they joined your team. This is cultural friction in its purest form: not a clash of values, but a collision of unexamined defaults.

How it shows up

You’ll rarely hear it named. What you’ll hear instead:

“They agreed in the meeting and then just did their own thing.” A team member with a looser orientation often experiences agreement as directional — yes, broadly, that’s the plan — while a tighter-oriented colleague heard a binding commitment to the specifics.

“They escalate everything instead of just using common sense.” From the tight side, escalating an exception is exactly what you’re supposed to do — the process didn’t cover this, so you ask. From the loose side, it reads as an inability to think independently.

“Why do we even have deadlines if nobody respects them?” A deadline is a norm like any other. Tightness-oriented members treat it as fixed; looseness-oriented members treat it as a strong preference that flexes when priorities shift. If this one stings, the friction may run deeper than dates — deadlines are just where it becomes visible.

And the quiet one, the expensive one: your tightness-oriented people slowly stop trusting the improvisers — not their work, their reliability. Once that story sets in, every skipped step confirms it.

The trap leaders fall into

The instinctive fix is enforcement: restate the process, tighten the controls, add a checkpoint. This works on exactly half the team — the half that was already following the process. For the other half, you’ve just confirmed their private suspicion that the team values compliance over results, and the best of them will start routing around you.

The opposite instinct — loosen everything, trust people, “we’re all adults” — fails just as reliably. Your tightness-oriented members don’t experience the absence of clear norms as freedom. They experience it as ambiguity, and ambiguity reads as risk. Some of your most conscientious people will quietly become anxious, over-check everything, and slow down.

You can’t out-enforce this, and you can’t out-relax it. You have to make the invisible contract explicit.

What actually works

Separate the load-bearing rules from the defaults. Most processes are a mix of rules that genuinely must hold every time — compliance, safety, client commitments, anything where one deviation creates real damage — and rules that are really just sensible defaults. Your team can’t tell which is which, so tight-oriented members treat everything as load-bearing and loose-oriented members treat everything as a default. Go through your core process and label it, out loud: these three steps are fixed, no exceptions, and here’s why. Everything else is the default path — deviate if you have a better route, and tell us what you learned. This one conversation removes an enormous amount of friction, because both orientations finally get what they need: clarity for one, latitude for the other.

Negotiate the norm, don’t announce it. A norm people helped set binds differently from a norm they were handed. When the team decides together what “done” means, what a deadline commitment is, and what happens when someone can’t meet one, the tightness-oriented members get the explicitness they rely on and the looseness-oriented members have genuinely consented rather than nodded along. Research on multicultural teams consistently finds that norms and practices are far more changeable than values — you will not change what a rule means to someone at a deep level, but you can absolutely agree what a rule means on this team.

Make deviation a protocol, not a betrayal. The improvisers on your team are often catching real flaws in the process — that’s what improvisation is for. Give it a channel: if you’re going to deviate, flag it before or as you do it, not after it’s discovered. This converts the loose orientation from a reliability threat into a process-improvement engine, and it gives your tight-oriented members the thing they actually need, which was never obedience — it was predictability.

Watch your own calibration. You have a setting too. If you’re tightness-leaning, notice how often “unprofessional” in your head really means “different tolerance for deviation.” If you’re looseness-leaning, notice that your relaxed relationship to your own rules is being read, by part of your team, as unreliability at the top. The team’s norms will drift toward whatever you actually enforce — not what the document says.

The point

The rule-following divide on your team is not a discipline problem, and treating it as one makes it worse. Cultural tightness and looseness only stays invisible until it’s named — two coherent systems of professionalism colliding, and like most cultural friction, it becomes an asset the moment it’s worked with rather than suppressed. Teams that hold both orientations, deliberately, get something rare: enough structure to be reliable and enough flexibility to adapt. That combination doesn’t happen by policing. It happens by design.