case study

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Topic: Leadership and Organisational Culture Week 9/S1

ORG30002 – Leadership Practice and Skills

What is Culture?

Culture is shared, pervasive, enduring and

implicit

It is the set of key values, assumptions,

understandings and norms that is shared by members of an organisation and taught to

new members as correct

Importance of Culture: It gives

individuals a sense of identity and generates a commitment to particular values and ways of doing things and serves two important

functions – (i) it integrates members so that they know how to relate to one another and

(ii) it helps the organisation adapt to external environment; i.e. Internal

integration and external adaptation

Levels of Corporate Culture

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Organisational Culture Vs Climate

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The High Performance Culture

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Cultural Leadership • A cultural leader articulates a vision for the organisational culture that

employees can believe in

• A cultural leader heads the day-to-day activities that reinforce the cultural vision

 Ceremonies

 Stories

 Symbols

 Specialised language

 Selection and socialisation

 Daily Actions

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Organisational Culture, Climate & Leadership Three perspectives on Organisational

Culture and Leadership:

o The role of leaders in creating an organisational culture;

o Leadership as maintenance and reproduction of organisational culture;

o Culture as framing and reframing by leadership

• Culture as a constraint on leadership

behaviour and initiatives

• Ideology as part of culture

• The role of employee engagement and voice

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The New Analytics of Culture: What Email, Slack, And Glassdoor Reveal About Your Organization. Harvard Business Review (Corritore, et al. Jan - Feb 2020).

A business’s culture can catalyse or undermine success.

THE PROBLEM - Culture is easy to sense but difficult to measure. The workhorses of culture research - employee surveys and questionnair es - are often unreliable.

A NEW APPROACH - Using big-data processing to mine the ubiquitous “digital traces” of culture in electronic communications, such as emails, Slack messages, and Glassdoor reviews and by studying the language employees use in these communications, they ar gue

that we can measure how culture actually influences their thoughts and behavior at work.

THEIR FINDINGS:

Cultural fit is important, but what predicts success most is the rate at which employees adapt as organizational culture changes over time – Fit versus Adaptability - Cultural fit was, on average, positively associated with career success - By building trusting social bonds to overcome their outsider status and leverage their distinctiveness.

Cognitive diversity helps teams during ideation but hinders execution – variations during project milestone stages

Homogeneous vs Heterogeneous Culture: The best cultures encourage diversity to drive innovation but are anchored by shared core beliefs. Example: Netflix

“Algorithms make estimates, but it is ultimately humans’ responsibility to make informed judgments using them. Managers must be vigilant about keeping metadata anonymous and must regularly audit algorithmic decision-making for bias to ensure that the use of language-based tools does not have unintended adverse consequences on culture” (2020:83).

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The Leader’s Guide to Corporate Culture: How To Manage The Eight Critical Elements of Organizational Life, Harvard Business Review (Groysberg, et al. 2018)

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Integrated culture: The frame work

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Source: Groysberg, et al.2018:48

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Source: Groysberg, et al. (2018:49)

The Competing Values Approach to Shaping Culture

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Model of Spiritual Leadership

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Leadership effectiveness Leadership effectiveness depends upon the leader behaving in a manner

that

1. Elicits the trust and loyalty of followers (Image Management);

2. Motivates the followers towards enthusiastic effort (Relationship development); and

3. Applies the knowledge, effort and material resources of the group to mission accomplishment (Resource deployment)

Source: Chemers, M.M (1997) An Integrative Theory of Leadership. Lawrence

Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ

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A Framework For Understanding Leadership

L = f (l, gm, s)

This formula means that the leadership process is a function of the leader, the group members, and other situational variables

The model states that leadership effectiveness can best be understood by examining its key variables: leader characteristics and traits, leader behavior and style, group member characteristics, and the internal and external environment

The four sets of variables are interrelated, with some linkages stronger than others

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Leadership Effectiveness Model

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A Closer Look at Leadership Effectiveness

• Whether or not a leader is effective depends on four sets of variables:

 Leader Characteristics & Traits –  Leader’s inner qualities that help the leader function effectively in many situations

 Examples include self-confidence, courage and problem-solving ability

 Leader Behavior & Style –  Activities the leader engages in, including his/her characteristic approach

 Examples include participative leadership, task-orientation behavior, authenticity

 Group Member Characteristics –  Attributes of the group members

 Examples include their intelligence and high level of motivation assist the leader with doing an outstanding job

 Internal & External Environment –  Elements/forces of the situation that may or may not be within the leader’s control

 Examples include economy, diversity of workforce, organizational culture D ia

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What is Contextual Leadership? • It is the ability to succeed in multiple contexts ( eg. Warren Bennis)

• Robert Thomas in Geeks & Geezers called this as adaptive capacity — which is the ability to change

one’s style and approach to fit the culture, context, or condition of an organization.

• The environmental factors create specific and sometimes unique contexts

• Within this context, some leaders foresaw new initiatives or new products and services, while others saw opportunities for maximizing or optimizing existing business opportunities, and still other

leaders found opportunities through reinvention or recreation of companies or technologies that were

considered stagnant or declining (Mayo, 2007)

• Context can provide the framework through which one might understand how individuals influence one another within relationship - relationships that are process oriented or socially constructed

• Success in the twenty-first century will require leaders to pay attention to the evolving context

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Preparation for next week… Read the following article before you come to the workshop:

Johnson, C., (2008), The rise and fall of Carly Fiorina, An Ethical Case Study,

Journal of Organization & Leadership Studies, 15:2, pp.188-196.

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