ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE AND LEADERSHIP

Organizational Culture and Leadership



Organizational Culture and Leadership

Introduction

Leadership, like history, is often remembered only for its spectacular moments. Leaders' lives and careers frequently are charted like time lines—sequences of grandiose events strung together by a linear, chronological thread. Career changes, takeovers, speeches, protests, and landmark moments become the historical memory of a given leader's tenure and impact, just as wars, treaties, disasters, and expansion comprise the educative content of our history texts. However, the fixation on these moments—largely constituted by a western narrative emphasis on the spectacle— betrays a potential epistemological myopia in our understandings of how leadership, and more broadly, culture, operate in and on human life (Hofstede,1980).

Cultural studies scholar Meaghan Morris (1990), in one of that field's now-seminal works, argued that banality, the sequence of everyday moments that serves as the thread holding these spectacles together, must be elevated in our analyses of culture. Morris suggested that the determination of banality itself, and the concomitant privileging of certain moments over others in our experience of the world, is under girded by a socially constructed disposition towards history and existence—one that raises the spectacle to an almost totemic status and that subsequently glosses over the remainder of culture that actually makes the spectacle possible. These criticisms certainly have application to leadership inquiry and practice, as the phenomenological experience of leadership is primarily lived in the everyday, mundane sequence of tasks and decisions. It is study of these moments, in all of their ethnological detail, that gives us nuanced understandings of the entire process and ecology of leadership and that give ground for deeper inquiry into the instances of spectacle. It is for these reasons that systematic and rigorous processes of leadership study are necessary: to unpack the whole scene of leadership—the historical moments, both large and small, that denude how and why leaders are effective (Morris, 1999).

This concept of control was translated into how organizations were structured and operated as the Industrial Era began. If control is desirable, then you structure your organizations hierarchically and make decisions top-down. You reward managers for keeping things copasetic. If a crisis creates instability, you expect the manager to re-establish equilibrium. Workers quickly learned in the Newtonian model not to make waves or raise problems. They were expected to use their hands, not their head, and to follow their supervisor's or boss's orders without comment (Morris, 1999).

The reigning organizational model—scientific management, based on the work of Frederick Taylor (Morris, 1995)—was totally consistent with the Newtonian paradigm, focused as it was on efficiency and predictability. This paradigm worked over the span of 250 years largely because life moved relatively slowly in the 1700s and 1800s, such that there were few major changes to which businesses had to adapt. But during the 20th century, advances in technology accelerated everything. Change came more rapidly; cause and effect were not so transparent as in earlier times, so predictability decreased, and change became discontinuous rather than linear, further reducing ...