Organization Culture and the role of the Leadership

“Culture and leadership are two sides of the same coin. When organizations start or when groups start there is always a leader who has a preferred way of doing things, and those preferences by definition are going to be imposed on the group members. If you don’t like the way I run this group, I’ll replace you. The leader’s values and preferences are the first ways that a group or organization does things and if that works it becomes eventually the culture of that group. So in a very real sense, founders and leaders create culture.” (Tim KUPPLER 2014)

Organizational culture, or corporate culture, compromises the attitudes, experiences, beliefs and values of an organization. It’s the specific collection of values and norms that are shared by people and groups in an organization which control the way they think and behave that has an impact on the organizational performance. It is necessary to shape and reshape the culture as teams evolve over the time, to face two basic challenges in business operations; integrating individual into an effective unit and adapting effectively to the external environment to survive.

We know that a company’s culture plays an important role in employee engagement, discretionary effort, teamwork and loyalty and that an organization’s culture impacts the company’s bottom line.

Further the leadership of the company is the primary shaper of the culture. It’s important to understand which leadership styles and behaviour have the most impact on culture. The background of people, group dynamics, operating environment, work condition, leadership style, structure, compensation policy/composition and social issues are factors that form the ‘natural organization culture’ (Kishu Gomez 2019)

By culture I mean the shared beliefs top managers have about how they should manage themselves and other employees and how they should conduct business (es) (Lorsch, 1985: 95)

References

Culture and Leadership two sides of the same coin: Available from:<https://www.tlnt.com/culture-and-leadership-theyre-simply-two-sides-of-the-same-coin/> [14 March 2014]

Kishu Gomez 2019, Sunday Observer: Biz Talk, The Advertiser