Leadership of Culture, Ethics, and Diversity
The Power of Culture – An organization determines the way that it responds to changes in its external and internal environment. Organizational performance is enhanced when strategy, structure, and capabilities are aligned to culture. Experts and scholars on organizational culture have long maintained that culture serves two important functions in organizations: (1) it creates internal unity, and (2) it helps the organization adapt to the external environment.
Internal Unity – Organizational culture defines a normative order that serves as a sources of consistent behavior inside an organization.
External Adaption – Culture determines how the organization responds to change in its external environment.
Low and High Performing Cultures- The strength of a culture depends of the degree to which these norms and practices are widely shared and strongly held throughout the organization. A weak culture symbolizes a strong agreement or shard mind-set on key values and norms, with leaders playing a key role. The strong culture is described as distinctive and very tight. Strong cultures are generally associated with high performance and weak cultures are generally associated with low performance.
Characteristics of low performing culture: gossiping, manipulation, favoritism, lack of communication, and internal conflict prevail. Weak cultures work against or hinder strategy implementation and are therefore seen as low performers. In these cultures Insular thinking takes place with managerial arrogance and inward thinking, this prevents the organization from making the needed cultural changes to become more productive. In this culture it also breeds resistance to change causing a lack of leadership, and destroys employee initiatives and new ides of creativity. Low cultures tend to want to maintain without risk.
The Leader’s Role in Influencing Culture
Substantive Actions – the leader can employ to