Abstract
The role of leadership has evolved over the years. Early leadership theories focused on the characteristics of the leader and have shifted to focus on the leader’s behavior, skills and style. Emerging leadership theories continued to shift focus to team leadership and subordinate motivation. Organizational culture is exists in all organizations and influences the work environment. Researchers have studied leadership and organizational culture individually; however there have been less focus on gaining an understanding of the relationship leadership and organizational culture.
In this paper, I will explore various leadership theories and relationship with organization culture. I will also reflect on the type of leadership style that promotes a positive organizational culture.
Introduction
Leaders set the tone for the organization while Organizational culture sets the values that influence the work environment. There needs to be some clarity on whether leadership influences organizational culture or does organizational culture influence leadership. In order to understand the relationship between leadership and organizational culture, we must first define them.
Leadership defined
Leadership is a process whereby an individual influences a group of individuals to achieve a common goal. (Northouse, 2013). Leadership involves establishing clear visions, communicating the vision to followers, and developing strategies to achieve those goals. Leaders are
Organizational leadership and culture has been a major issue in today’s highly structured organizations. This has necessitated that organizations understand in depth the inter-relation between culture and organization on strategic leadership. Is it that the leadership determines culture or the culture determines leadership behaviors? While many argue that the leaders have absolute control and influence the direction of organizational culture, research actually shows that leaders themselves are greatly influenced by variables and situational setting in any organization, implying that it is valid to say that leadership itself receives significant influence from organizational culture (Waldner & Weeks, 2006).
Business leaders are responsible for creating and sufficient culture. There are two different types of cultures: 1) the compliance based culture. 2) The value based culture. First type is the compliance based culture is culture in which employees follow the rules, and orders without any doubt as an essential responsibility of ethics. While the value based culture focuses on some specific values rather than on some rules this makes it more elastic. Leadership is the process of inspiring and motivating people to reach specific goals of a company or an organization. To be a leader you should have the “ability to inspire, motivate, and influence others to reach a target goal”. There are two types of leader effective leader, and ethical leader. There is one difference between them which is the ways each leader use to influence, and motivate, to reach the goals of the company and to maximize wealth of the shareholders. Effective leader could achieve his or her goals in bad terms, like: threating; and duress. However; ethical leader could achievegoals through modeling ethical behavior, and to have a charisma. A strong business leader could have a deep impact on a corporate culture of a company. Culture could be found in the hierarchical structure, tempo of work, methods of problem solving, and incentives. Receptivity-listening, honesty,
In any organization it is essential to understand the relationship between organizational culture, leadership behavior and job satisfaction. This understanding allows management to know what cultural factors drive the organization and can be used to align the organization with its strategy allow for a good reward system. Culture within organizations is important as it plays an enormous role on whether employees are in happy and safe environments and can perform at the full capacity. Strong cultures are based on two characteristics, high levels of agreement among employees about what’s a valued and high level of intensity about these values CITATION Cha03 \l 1033 (Chatman & Cha, 2003). Although it seemed as if it had a great culture
In chapter 1-3 we have learned a lot about leadership and different roles of leadership. In Chapter one we are taught about the definitions and the significance of leadership. In chapter two we learn about global and cultural context. Global and cultural context let us know about the roles culture can play in leadership and how a leader can develop a cultural mindset. In Chapter three we learn about the early theories of the foundations of modern leadership. There are three eras of leadership, which consist of the trait era, the behavior era, and the contingency era, which is the era that we are in now.
House et al. (2007) discovers that leadership and Organisational culture are closely linked together as leaders influence the culture of their organisations. Researches talk about a range of leadership definitions but it is not easy to define. (E.g. Western, 2008; Yukl, 2010). However, Cohen (2009) critically analyses definitions from Dracker (1996), Eisenhower (1969), Northouse (2004) and finally summarised the definition of leadership constitutes five elements. First of all, ask question to set direction, which means effective leaders need to listen to followers’ voice respectfully and then share the common goals and ideas with them. In addition, leaders need to seek insights and allocate resources optimally; act ethically; allow their
Organizational leadership and culture has been a major issue in today’s highly structured organizations. This has necessitated that organizations understand in depth the inter-relation between culture and organization on strategic leadership. Is it that the leadership determines culture or the culture determines leadership behaviors? While many argue that the leaders have absolute control and influence the direction of organizational culture, research actually shows that leaders themselves are greatly influenced by variables and situational setting in any organization, implying that it is valid to say that leadership itself receives significant influence from organizational culture (Waldner & Weeks, 2006).
There is different leadership styles appeared in organizations or work environments. A leader or manager must identify how to develop a more productive, motivated and stable workforce environments by creating or changing its culture. Deal and Kennedy defined organizational culture as “the way we do things around here” (Deal & Kennedy,
There are two types of leadership styles and two types of leader behaviors; leaders who focus on employees completing a task and leaders who focus on employee’s emotions to complete a task. For example, leader task oriented may disconnect from the human and focus on the task at hand. However, a leader who is employee oriented will focus on training, demonstrating and ensuring that the employee is clear on the task at hand. Per the McGregor’s Theory X and Theory Y research, it is stated that Theory Y
Organizational cultures are created, maintained, or transformed by people. An organization's culture is, in part, also created and maintained by the organization's leadership. Leaders at the executive level are the principle source for the generation and re-infusion of an organization's ideology, articulation of core values and specification of norms. Organizational values express preferences for certain behaviours or certain outcomes. Organizational norms express behaviours accepted by others. They are culturally acceptable ways of pursuing goals. Leaders also establish the parameters for formal lines of communication and message content-the formal interaction rules for the organization. Values and norms, once transmitted through the organization, establish the permanence of the organization's culture.
To this extent then, leaders are obviously having a significant impact on the influencing their employees to be productive and align their goals to those of the organization. In effect, this promotes a way of doing things within an organization, which becomes the organizational culture.so with regard to investigating the impact of leaders on the organization, We have had collected some data from France by interviewing (asking questions) the
Leadership has meaning only in an organizational context, and only in the sense of managing within a system of inequalities. Superior-subordinate relationships help to define leadership behavior, and the culture in any particular society influences the nature of these relationships. Two leadership roles are common to all societies, however. The first is the Charismatic role, or the capability to provide vision and inspiration. This is emphasized by transformational leadership concepts. The second is the instrumental role, or the capability to design effective organizational processes, control activities, and meet organizational objectives. This describes the functional expectations of someone is a leadership role. However, each society
There are two systems used to model the relationship between leaders and culture, functionalist and anthropological. The functionalist view states that leaders build the organizational culture which supports change, where the anthropological view questions this ability. Since most reviewed evidence points toward the functionalist outlook, the study is approached from this viewpoint.
Studying these approaches help us to develop research proposals to the following research question: to what extent the organizational culture of a company influence the way leadership is implemented?
The leadership behaviours of corporation leaders can affect its culture by influencing the members of the corporation from top-down. Culture is taught to employees by those in experienced managerial positions; so regularly practised that it becomes the norm, and is then emulated by new employees who continue the behavioural patterns (Hellriegel et al. 2004, cited in Mishra & Raykundaliya 2011, p. 87; Kruger 2003, cited in Mishra & Raykundaliya 2011, p. 87). As Shim and Steer’s (2012, p. 585) article observed in Toyota,
Although several studies have analysed the connection between organizational culture and leadership such as using knowledge management practices (Hai Nam Nguyen and Sherif