Comfort Fit is Not Culture Fit
You know the feeling. You’re interviewing a candidate, and they remind you of yourself ten years ago. You laugh at the same jokes. You went to similar schools. You both love the same baseball team.
It feels easy. It feels safe. It feels like culture fit.
But it’s not. That’s comfort fit. And comfort fit is affinity bias in action.
The Problem With Comfort
Affinity bias is our very human tendency to prefer people who feel familiar to us. Psychologists link it back to in-group favoritism: our brain’s shortcut for deciding who to trust. It’s part of how we survived in small tribes: stick with the people who look, think, and act like you.
But in the workplace, that shortcut has a cost.
We hire people who mirror our own backgrounds.
We give plum assignments to those who validate our style.
We promote the ones who feel most comfortable to be around.
And in doing so, we limit innovation, exclude diverse voices, and reinforce sameness.
Research shows that diverse teams outperform homogeneous ones, particularly in problem solving and innovation (Rock & Grant, 2016; Harvard Business Review). Yet, affinity bias nudges us in the opposite direction toward building echo chambers that feel aligned, but are actually insular.
What Culture Fit Really Means
The phrase “culture fit” has been warped. Somewhere along the way, it went from alignment on values and purpose to “someone I’d grab a beer with.” But true culture fit has nothing to do with personal comfort. It’s about:
Shared commitment to the organization’s purpose.
Alignment with core values and the behaviors that bring them to life.
A willingness to push, challenge, and stretch the organization—while staying grounded in its principles.
Think of it this way: comfort fit is about similarity. Culture fit is about alignment.
The Business Case Against Comfort Fit
Letting comfort dictate culture decisions hurts performance.
Performance & innovation suffer. Research from McKinsey (2020 Diversity Wins) shows companies in the top quartile for ethnic and cultural diversity are 36% more likely to outperform their peers in profitability. Affinity bias works against this.
Psychological safety erodes. When only familiar voices are rewarded, others learn quickly to stay silent. And as Amy Edmondson’s research on psychological safety shows, silence kills learning and adaptation (HBR).
Turnover increases. Employees who don’t see pathways for advancement (because promotions are reserved for the “inner circle”) disengage and leave. Gallup has consistently tied inclusion and recognition to retention (Gallup Workplace Studies).
In other words, comfort might feel good in the short term, but it undermines organizational resilience in the long term.
How to Move Past Bias
Affinity bias is human. But building systems to counteract it is leadership.
Here are some evidence-based practices to move from comfort fit to true culture fit:
Structured interviews. Research shows structured interviews are far more predictive of job performance than unstructured ones, and they reduce the influence of bias (Campion et al., 1997).
Values-based evaluation. Define your values clearly, and build them into hiring rubrics, promotion criteria, and recognition programs. Culture fit should be assessed by behaviors tied to those values, not by gut feel.
Diverse decision-making panels. Including a mix of perspectives in hiring and promotion decisions reduces the sway of any one person’s affinity bias.
Bias awareness training. Awareness doesn’t solve bias, but it helps leaders slow down and interrogate their instincts before making big calls.
The Bottom Line
Comfort fit feels good. Culture fit builds strong.
If your organization is serious about culture, stop rewarding familiarity. Stop mistaking sameness for alignment.
Because the leaders who will take your culture forward aren’t the ones who feel the most like you. They’re the ones who make the culture more like what it’s meant to be.
