Why Firing the Team Won’t Fix Biotech Culture: Froggatt

Tom Froggatt told us on one of the Pathways in Life Science podcast episodes that culture is not the people, it’s the space between them. That one stuck. So I went and pulled the actual primate research underneath the famous Five Monkeys story, and what it has to say about why biotech keeps making the same mistake when its culture goes sour.

The Five Monkeys story is half myth and half real science

The popular version with the ladder, the banana, and the ice water is a parable. No published study used that setup. The credible source it’s loosely riffing on is G.R. Stephenson’s 1966 paper “Cultural Acquisition of a Specific Learned Response Among Rhesus Monkeys,” in Progress in Primatology. Stephenson conditioned rhesus monkeys to avoid a kitchen utensil using an air blast, then paired each trained animal with a naive partner. The naive monkeys learned the avoidance from their cagemate, even after the air blast was switched off and the original trained animal was removed. The behavior survived multiple animal swaps, transmitted through social cues alone. The banana version is dressed up, but the punchline holds. Environments transmit behavior long after the original cause is gone.

Why “replace the team” feels right and almost never works

Edgar Schein’s three-levels model, from his 1985 book Organizational Culture and Leadership, explains the trap. Schein put visible artifacts at the top, espoused values in the middle, and unconscious shared assumptions at the bottom. The artifacts are easy to change. The assumptions are nearly invisible and very stubborn. When a new chief executive lands and trims 15 percent of headcount, they are pruning the artifact layer. The assumptions that produced the bad culture, who gets to disagree, how bad news travels upward, what gets quietly celebrated, are still in the building. New badges, same operating system.

Psychological safety is the closest thing biotech has to a measurable culture metric

Amy Edmondson at Harvard Business School coined “team psychological safety” in her 1999 Administrative Science Quarterly paper. The trigger was a counterintuitive result in hospital nursing units. Better-performing teams reported more medication errors, not fewer. They were not making more mistakes. They were surfacing them. Google’s Project Aristotle later studied 180 internal teams and named psychological safety the single strongest predictor of team effectiveness, ahead of skill mix, tenure, or seniority. For a biotech where one buried protocol deviation or one quiet “I think this assay is wrong” can compound into a full development setback, that finding lands harder than anywhere else.

Disengagement has a price tag

Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2024 report put global employee engagement at 23 percent and estimated the cost of low engagement at 8.9 trillion dollars per year, roughly 9 percent of global gross domestic product. The 2025 update slipped to 21 percent, with that one-year drop alone costing an estimated 438 billion dollars in productivity. Manager engagement specifically fell from 27 percent to 22 percent between 2024 and 2025. Those are not soft numbers. In a biotech with a 24-month cash runway, a disengaged manager layer translates directly into slower decisions, slower hiring, and slower science.

What the 2025 biotech layoff data says about the firing-as-fix loop

BioSpace’s layoff tracker counted more than 41,000 biopharma job cuts across over 180 companies through October 2025, on top of roughly 24,000 in 2024. Some were strategic. Plenty were the familiar pattern. Missed milestone, new chief executive, restructure, repeat. If Stephenson’s monkeys and Schein’s assumptions are right, those reorganizations did not touch the actual culture problem. They reset the headcount line. The shared assumptions that produced the original miss were still in the room when the new team walked in.

What actually shifts culture: small moves, applied relentlessly

Three moves the research consistently supports. First, leaders model the new behavior in public, especially around bad news and dissent, where Edmondson’s data on the upstream effect is unambiguous. Second, the systems change alongside the people, decision rights, meeting rituals, performance reviews, rewards, because artifact-only change does not stick. Third, you bring along the people who can be brought, because every replaced senior leader resets the cultural transmission clock back toward the original assumptions.

At North Star Scientific, we see the same dynamic on the commercial side. Brand partners who keep their best GENinCode, AffinityImmuno, and Trialynx reps for years treat culture as an asset to manage, not a vibe to hope for. The ones with revolving doors usually have a “we just need different people” assumption hiding in the drywall. That assumption is the thing to fix.

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