Chapter 10 - Leadership Culture Flashcards
What is Culture? (Why relevant?)
“The glue” that binds together a group of people.
- shared set of values, beliefs, attitudes and basic assumptions are manifested in the group’s artefacts.
- membership through adaption and integrations of the group’s set of values and beliefs.
- becoming a member takes time
- the culture pervades everything in the group and is set deep in the subconscious.
- when truly integrated - norms and values of a culture are defining the shared sense of belonging within a group and then have a stabilising effect on the group.
- New members as well as existing members will through interaction with each other and the environment contribute to these subtle or radical changes in the existing culture.
The Link between Culture & Leadership
We see culture as a variable or as a root metaphor.
- Seeing culture as a variable within organisations –> this variable (culture) i manageable and ought to be managed in order to align employees’ behaviour and attitudes.
Leaders have been given the key role of cultural change agents and cultural enforcers, creating, maintaining and changing organisational cultures to improve their overall performance.
Leadership is equally seen as a symbolic activity, engaging in sense- and meaning making and shaping followers’ beliefs, values and behaviours.
Different types of culture
Can exist in many different forms and at different levels of society - an individual is linked to a mix of cultures as she is part of various different groups.
Membership vary in their importance for the individual’s own value set and will change over time. May be variation in each dominant culture- counter or subcultures.
Less explored - occupational cultures that can cover both organisations and societies.
- may lead to subcultures or countercultures and is becoming more or less important for the individual’s set of values depending on the context and situation the individual finds herself in at a specific moment in time.
- Less attention to regional diversity in society and the overlap of the national or societal culture with other dominant cultures.
A Model of Organisational Culture (Schein)
Explores the different levels of a culture and the extent to which each culture is unique, complex and rooted in taken-for-granted assumptions shared by members of that culture.
Explains why the same hierarchical position or professional role in the same industry may feel and be enacted very differently across organisations due to the differences in the culture.
- ARTEFACTS - stories, myths, jokes, metaphors, rites, rituals and ceremonies, hereos and symbols
- BELIEFS, VALUES AND ATTITUDES. These concern things that have organisational worth or meaning to the founders or senior management.
- BASIC ASSUMPTIONS. (deepest level of culture). These concern the environment, reality, human nature, human activity and human relationships.
Schein treats culture as something manageable.
Leadership and Culture Management
Schein sees leadership and culture as essentially entwined concepts. Cultural norms define how an organisation will define leadership, however leaders create and manage culture.
“The ultimate act of leadership is to destroy culture when it is dysfunctional”
-Leaders act as both engineers and role models of a specific organisational culture.
Culture creating through founder = the individual’s view of the world drives the beliefs, values and assumptions of the organisations through the initial vision, member selection and processes.
Leadership and Culture Management
1. Primary embedding mechanisms
What/How leaders…
- Pay attention to, measure and control on regular basis.
- React to critical incidents and organisational crises.
- Allocate resources
- Role modelling, teaching and coaching.
- Allocate rewards and status
- Select, promote and excommunicate.
Leadership and Culture Management
1. Secondary embedding mechanisms
- Organisational design and structure
- Organisational systems and procedures
- Rites and rituals of the organisation
- Design of the physical space, facades and buildings
- Stories about important events and people
- Formal statements of organisational philosophy, creeds and charters.
Critical view on leadership and cultural management
- Culture management - value-based leadership - transformational leadership.
-The symbolic nature of leadership and the relational influence of a leader
within and on a group’s sense-making process of reality and their culture.
Followers look instinctively
to to a leader for active sense-making. This is subconsciously done by looking at the leader’s every move, action, conversation and so on as a symbolic manifestation of the underlying assumptions and
values of the leaders and subsequently of the wider organisation.
“Cultural orientation”: Leaders could make an effort to shape followers’ values, ideals and attitudes.
Social Identity Theory, Culture and Leadership
återkom!
Hofstede’s cultural dimensions
- Power distance
- Masculinity/Feminity
- Uncertainty avoidance
- Individualism/Collectivism
- Long-term orientation vs short term orientation
Etic research on societal culture and leadership
- Studying certain characteristics or phenomena across various cultures, eg finding universal leadership behaviours or comparing the effectiveness of specific leadership styles across cultures.
Shares Hofstede’s assumptions on culture as the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one group or category from another.
National culture the earliest.
It has provided us with
reliable data on different leadership preferences in different countries—can be used for sensitivity
training. Globe project is the largest and most successful cross-cultural leadership research project.
Emic research on societal culture and leadership
Emic research: studying a phenomenon within its local context and through the lens of natives of the local culture
The emic approach draws on anthropological methods
of ethnographies, observations and in-depth interviews to engage with people’s understanding and interpretations of culture, and is hence more closely aligned with the root metaphor approach to culture as it treats culture as complex, naturally evolving and uncontrollable.
Less focus on comparisons of similarities and differences and more about a greater focus on the culture-specific and allowing for possible bridges and links between cultures.
Critical views may suggest that etic approaches can be seen to be perpetuating stereotypes, emic approaches
are working against stereotypes and giving voice to minorities and diversity within cultures.
The GLOBE project
Constitutes a major contribution to the field of cross-cultural leadership studies. The most successfull project in providing supporting evidence for the very link between leadership and culture. It shows culture-specific preferences for effective leadership and existing culture-specific differences in leadership.
Cross-cultural study on a global scale.
Aim of GLOBE?
To determine the extent to which practices and values of business leadership are
universal (that is, are similar globally), and the extent to which they are specific to just a few societies.
The GLOBE team: cultural dimensions
- Uncertainty avoidance
- Power distance
- Institutional collectivism
- In-group collectivism
- Gender egalitarianism
- Assertiveness
- Future orientation
- Performance orientation
- Humane orientation
