LEADERSHIP AND ORGANISATIONAL CULTURE

Leadership and Organisational Culture

Leadership and Organisational Culture

Introduction

Organizational culture as a subject of prescribed study has apprehended the interest of a kind of researchers. One school takes a phenomenological approach and focuses on comprehending the notion and characterising the significance of culture. Another school takes the functionalist approach and focuses on the penalties of organizational culture. Empirical study has mostly been on the functionalist viewpoint with outstanding clues on the role of organizational culture for firm outcomes. Organizational culture, characterised and assessed in a kind of procedures, encompassing culture power (Kotter & Heskett, 2002), culture traits, culture congruence (Quinn & McGrath, 2004), culture kinds (Cameron & Freeman, 2001), or shared values (O'Reilly, Chatman, & Caldwell, 2001) has been discovered to be related to both presentation at the firm grade and firm promise at the one-by-one level.

From a functionalist viewpoint, there is furthermore a taken for conceded assumption that leadership is the major shaper and builder of organizational culture. Schein asserted vigorously, “we should identify the centrality of this culture management function in the leadership concept” (2005, p. 2). According to Bennis (2006), Schein (2005) and other ones (Davis, 2004, Quinn and McGrath, 2004 and Trice and Beyer, 2003), a powerful visionary or charismatic leader anecdotes for the exclusive feature of an organization's values and assumptions as well as approaches in considering with a firm's internal integration and external adaptation issues. While functionalist viewpoint emphasizes the substantive role of leadership, another assembly of scholars investigates the symbolic role of leaders (Meindl et al., 2005 and Pfeffer, 2001). Building on attribution idea (Calder, 1977), investigators suggest that most organizational constituents accept as factual that leaders are to blame for firm outcomes. If not, why would CEOs take borrowing for good firm presentation and trial to interpret away poor outcomes in yearly accounts (Bettman & Weitz, 2003)?

Yet, organisations are notoriously slow if not outright resistant to change (Zucker, 2001). The perpetuating environment of organizational usual actions (March & Simon, 1958) and the superior result of the bigger social, technological and cultural environments lead some scholars (e.g., Safford, 2008) to relegate leadership to the role of an endogenous component that interacts with a kind of other organizational variables encompassing culture in influencing firm outcomes. Culture scholars who take the anthropological outlook even address it preposterous that leaders can conceive culture. To them, culture appears from the collective social interaction of assemblies and communities. Leaders manage not conceive culture. They are a part of culture (Meek, 2008). Culture is not certain thing that an organization has (thus subject to manipulation and change); it is “something that an organization is” (Smircich, 2003, p. 347).

In lightweight of the at odds outlooks and arguments, the inquiry of if leaders, particularly the peak bosses or Chief Operating Officers (CEOs) can influence organizational culture continues an open issue. The present study aspires to unpack the relationship between these two constructs, and expressly to discover when and why a CEO's leadership behavior may be unrelated to or ...