Most people think of organizations as almost monolithic in their internal culture and mindset, near-unitary structures that may involve thousands or tens of thousands of employees who share a similar approach to the issues they face.

But that’s not the way USC Marshall School of Business lecturer Dave Logan says managers should think about, or more importantly, lead their organizations.

That’s the conclusion Logan came to and now has written about after spending eight years surveying 24,000 people at companies such as biotech giant Amgen and design firm IDEO.

Logan is co-author, with Halee Fischer-Wright ’06 and John King, of the just-published book Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization, which features a forward from University Professor Warren Bennis.

Logan, a USC Marshall doctoral alum and former associate dean, was so enthused about the implications of his research that he throttled back his teaching load to push this book and another he hopes to publish next year.

His decision is paying off, as Tribal Leadership is attracting a lot of attention. Logan recently taught the book’s basic tenets to a few hundred USC managers as part of a university-wide executive-education program.

The book’s basic points are fairly straightforward: People within organizations tend to organize themselves into small groups, or “tribes,” ranging in size from a few to a few hundred people. These groups tend to share similar values and mindsets regarding their work, their company and their colleagues.

Most importantly, how you manage those groups depends on where they fall on a scale of one through five (one being the most difficult) in terms of cultural development.

“The things that matter most are culture,” Logan said. “You can diagnose one of these five types of culture. And once you diagnose the culture, you can begin to address it.”

Managing a group of Level 2 employees like they are at Level 4 is a waste of time, and vice versa, he said.

“Every different tribe has a different prescription,” Fischer-Wright said. “So the interventions are very much stage specific.”

Level 1 is thankfully quite rare, the sort of despairing mess that spawns workplace violence and other problems, said Fischer-Wright, a physician and graduate of USC Marshall’s master’s program in medical management.

About a quarter of the time, a tribe is at Level 2, where each person feels isolated from others and may be locked in an endless loop of criticism about their colleagues and themselves.

The most common sort of organization, about half of the total, is at Level 3, which Fischer-Wright described as an attitude of “I’m great, and you’re not.”

To help evolve a tribe from the self-defeated Level 2, Logan said it’s important to find the people who, usually privately, voice a desire to be better. One option: Give them opportunities to become stars and to succeed and rise in the organization.

“Find the people on the cusp who want things to be different,” Logan said. “You’re trying to change the way those people talk.”

Level 3 tends to be particularly common in academic institutions where the star system is the basis for recognition, tenure, advancement and more. Logan said that USC has many pockets of higher-achieving tribes, at Level 4 or even 5.

Such higher-performing tribes are often found in young, flexible and highly successful organizations, such as Amgen and Pixar. But they can be found even in older and more bureaucratic organizations, even in parts of government where there is a higher level of esprit de corps and a sense of a larger, shared purpose.

Members of Level 4 tribes are connected with each other but tend to see their organization in terms of its superiority to other groups. A successful athletic team is a classic Level 4, defining its superiority by the teams it has beaten, Logan said.

To get to Level 5, organizations need to be focused on something beyond how they stack up against other groups. To use the language of Steve Jobs at Apple (which often has reached the heights of Level 5), the organization should seek to create something “insanely great.”

“If you want an example of a Level 5, look at the Manhattan Project,” Fischer-Wright said. “All the best minds worked in that project to create something that would end the war. Forty and 50 years later, they still talked about that as the great experience of their lives, even people who won the Nobel Prize.”

The key, Logan said, is to get people to invest in something larger than themselves. But to do that, you have to carefully grow your organization and its tribes, so they’re ready to embrace and pursue a truly life-changing achievement. The challenges of making that happen explain why Level 5 is so rare.

“The vast majority of people have never been in a Level 5 organization and frankly don’t believe it exists,” Logan said.