ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE AND LEADERSHIP DEFINED

Culture is both a dynamic phenomenon that surrounds us at all times, being constantly
enacted and created by our interactions with others and shaped by leadership behavior,
and a set of structures, routines, rules, and norms that guide and constrain behavior.
When one brings culture to the level of the organization and even down to groups within
the organization, one can see clearly how culture is created, embedded, evolved, and
ultimately manipulated, and, at the same time, how culture constrains, stabilizes, and
provides structure and meaning to the group members. These dynamic processes of
culture creation and management are the essence of leadership and make one realize that
leadership and culture are two sides of the same coin.

Leadership has been studied in far greater detail than organizational culture, leading to a
frustrating diffusion of concepts and ideas of what leadership is really all about, whether
one is born or made as a leader, whether one can train people to be leaders, and what
characteristics successful leaders possess. I will not review this

literature, focusing instead on what I consider to be uniquely associated with

As we will see, this requires an evolutionary perspective. I believe that cultures begin
with leaders who impose their own values and assumptions on a group. If that group is
successful and the assumptions come to be taken for granted, we then have a culture that
will define for later generations of members what kinds of leadership are acceptable.
The culture now defines leadership. But as the group runs into adaptive difficulties, as
its environment changes to the point where some of its assumptions are no longer valid,
leadership comes into play once more. Leadership is now the ability to step outside the
culture that created the leader and to start evolutionary change processes that are more
adaptive. This ability to perceive the limitations of one’s own culture and to evolve the
culture adaptively is the essence and ultimate challenge of leadership.

If leaders are to fulfill this challenge, they must first understand the dynamics of
culture, so our journey begins with a focus on definitions, case illustrations, and a
suggested way of thinking about organizational culture. In this part, I begin in Chapter
One with some brief illustrations and a definition. Chapter Two expands the concept and
argues for a multilevel conception of culture. In Chapter Three, I examine in some detail
two cases that illustrate well the complexity of culture and will be used throughout the
rest of the book. And in Chapter Four, I show how culture arises in the process of
human interaction.

At this point, the most important message for leaders is this: “try to understand culture,
give it its due, and ask yourself how well you can begin to understand the culture in
which you are embedded.

Culture and Leadership

When we examine culture and leadership closely, we see that they are two sides of the
same coin; neither can really be understood by itself. On the one hand, cultural norms
define how a given nation or organizations will define leadership—who will get
promoted, who will get the attention of followers. On the other hand, it can be argued
that the only thing of real importance that leaders do is to create and manage culture;
that the unique talent of leaders is their ability to understand and work with culture; and
that it is an ultimate act of leadership to destroy culture when it is viewed as
dysfunctional.

If one wishes to distinguish leadership from management or administration, one can

Culture is the result of a complex group learning process that is only partially influenced
by leader behavior. But if the group’s survival is threatened because elements of its
culture have become maladapted, it is ultimately the function of leadership at all levels
of the organization to recognize and do something about this situation. It is in this sense
that leadership and culture are conceptually intertwined.

Toward a Formal Definition of Culture When we apply the concept of culture to groups,
organizations, and occupations, we are almost certain to have conceptual and semantic
confusion, because such social units are themselves difficult to define unambiguously. I
will use as the critical defining characteristic of a group the fact that its members have a
shared history. Any social unit that has some kind of shared history will have evolved a
culture, with the strength of that culture dependent on the length of its existence, the
stability of the group’s membership, and the emotional intensity of the actual historical
experiences they have shared. We all have a commonsense notion of this phenomenon,
yet it is difficult to define it abstractly. In talking about organizational culture with
colleagues and members of organizations, I oftenfind that we agree that “it” exists and
that it is important in itseffects, but when we try to define it, we have completely
differentideas of what “it” is.

To make matters worse, the concept of culture has been the subject of considerable
academic debate in the last twenty-five years and there are various approaches to
defining and studying culture (for example, those of Hofstede, 1991; Trice and Beyer,
1993; Schultz, 1995; Deal and Kennedy, 1999; Cameron and Quinn, 1999; Ashkanasy,
Wilderom, and Peterson, 2000; and Martin, 2002). This debate is a healthy sign in that it
testifies to the importance of culture as a concept, but at the same time it creates
difficulties for both the scholar and the practitioner if definitions are fuzzy and usages
are inconsistent. For the purpose of this introductory chapter, I will give only a quick
overview of this range of usage and then offer a precise and formal definition that makes
the most sense from my point of view. Other usages and points of view will be further
reviewed in later chapters.

Commonly used words relating to culture emphasize one of its critical aspects—the idea
that certain things in groups are shared or held in common.

All of these concepts relate to culture or reflect culture in that they deal with things that
group members share or hold in common, but none of them can usefully be thought of
as “the culture” of an organization or group. If one asks why we need the word culture at
all when we have so many other concepts—such as norms, values, behavior patterns,
rituals, traditions, and so on—one recognizes that the word culture adds several other
critical elements to the concept of sharing: structural stability, depth, breadth, and
patterning or integration.

HOW LEADERS EMBED AND TRANSMIT CULTURE

As the organization stabilizes because of success in accomplishing its primary task, the
leader’s assumptions become shared and the embedding of those assumptions can then
be thought of more as a process of socializing new members or acculturating them to the
group. From the point of view of a new member, it is a process of the leader and old-
timers in the group teaching the new member how to get along in the group and become
accepted as a member. The simplest explanation of how leaders get their message across
is that they do it through charisma—that mysterious ability to capture the subordinates’
attention and to communicate major assumptions and values in a vivid and clear manner
(Bennis and Nanus, 1985; Conger, 1989; Leavitt, 1986). The problem with charisma as
an embedding mechanism is that leaders who have it are rare and their impact is hard to
predict. Historians can look back and say that certain people had charisma or had a great
vision. It is not always clear at the time, however, how they transmitted the vision.
What Leaders Pay Attention to, Measure, and Control One of the most powerful
mechanisms that founders, leaders, managers, or even colleagues have available for
communicating what they believe in or care about is what they systematically pay
attention to. This can mean anything from what they notice and comment on to what
they measure, control, reward, and in other ways deal with systematically. Even casual
remarks and questions that are consistently geared to a certain area can be as potent as
formal control mechanisms and measurements.

If leaders are aware of this process, then being systematic in paying attention to certain
things becomes a powerful way of communicating a message, especially if leaders are
totally consistent in their own behavior. On the other hand, if leaders are not aware of
the power of this process or they are inconsistent in what they pay attention to,
subordinates and colleagues will spend inordinate time and energy trying to decipher
what a leader’s behavior really reflects and will even project motives onto the leader
where none may exist. This mechanism is well captured by the phrase “you get what
you settle for.” As a consultant, I have learned that my own consistency in what I ask
questions about sends clear signals to my audience about my priorities, values, and
beliefs. It is the consistency that is important, not the intensity of the attention. To
illustrate, at a recent conference on safety in industrial organizations, the speaker from
Alcoa pointed out that one of their former CEOs, Paul O’Neill, wanted to get across to
workers how important safety was, and did this by insisting that the first item on every
meeting agenda was to be a discussion of safety issues. Douglas McGregor (1960) tells
of a company that wanted him to help install a management development program.

The president hoped that McGregor would propose exactly what to do and how to do it.
Instead, McGregor asked the president whether he really cared about identifying and
developing managers. On being assured that he did, McGregor proposed that he should
build his concern into the reward system and set up a consistent way of monitoring
progress; in other words, he should start to pay attention to it. The president agreed and
announced that henceforth 50 percent of each senior manager’s annual bonus would be
contingent on what he had done to develop his own immediate subordinates during the
past year. He added that he himself had no specific program in mind, but that in each
quarter he would ask each senior manager what had been done. One might think that the
bonus was the primary incentive for the senior managers to launch programs, but far
more important was the fact that they had to report regularly on what they were doing.

The senior managers launched a whole series of different activities, many of them pulled
together from work that was already going on piecemeal in the organization. A coherent
program was forged over a two-year period and has continued to serve this company
well. The president continued his quarterly questions and once a year evaluated how
much each manager had done for development. He never imposed any program, but by
paying consistent attention to management development and by rewarding progress, he
clearly signaled to the organization that he considered management development to be
important.

At the other extreme, some DEC managers illustrated how inconsistent and shifting
attention causes subordinates to pay less and less attention to what senior management
wants, thereby empowering the employee level by default. For example, a brilliant
manager in one technical group would launch an important initiative and demand total
support, but two weeks later he would launch a new initiative without indicating
whether or not people were supposed to drop the old one. As subordinates two and three
levels down observed this seemingly erratic behavior, they began to rely more and more
on their own judgment of what they should actually be doing. Some of the most
important signals of what founders and leaders care about are sent during meetings and
in other activities devoted to planning and budgeting, which is one reason why planning
and budgeting are such important managerial processes. In questioning subordinates
systematically on certain issues, leaders can transmit their own view of how to look at
problems. The ultimate content of the plan may not be as important as the learning that
goes on during the planning process.
Emotional Outbursts.

Founders and leaders also let members know what they care about with an even more
powerful signal: their emotional reactions, especially their emotional outbursts when
they feel that one of their important values or assumptions is being violated.

Such outbursts are not necessarily very overt, because many managers believe that one
should not allow one’s emotions to become too involved in the decision-making
process. But subordinates generally know when their bosses are upset. On the other
hand, some leaders do allow themselves to get overtly angry and upset and use those
feelings as messages.

Inferences from What Leaders Do Not Pay Attention To. Other powerful signals that
subordinates interpret for evidence of the leader’s assumptions are what leaders do not
react to. For example, at DEC, managers were frequently in actual trouble with cost
overruns, delayed schedules, and imperfect products, but such trouble rarely caused
comment if the manager had evidenced that he or she was in control of the situation.
Trouble could be expected and was assumed to be a normal condition of doing business;
only failure to cope and regain control was unacceptable. In DEC’s product design
departments, one frequently found excess personnel, very high budgets, and lax
management with regard to cost controls, none of which occasioned much comment.
Subordinates correctly interpreted this to mean that it was far more important to come
up with a good product than to control costs.

Inconsistency and Conflict.

The combinations of what founder leaders do and do not pay attention to can be
challenging to decipher because they reveal the areas where unconscious conflicts may
exist. For example, at DEC the clear concern for customers was signaled by outbursts
after customers complained. But this attitude coexisted with an implicit arrogance
toward certain classes of customers because the engineers often assumed that they knew
what the customer would like in the way of product design and Olsen implicitly
reinforced this attitude by not reacting in a corrective way when engineers displayed
such attitudes. Olsen’s own attitudes toward more or less technically sophisticated
customers were not clear, but his silent condoning of his engineers’ behavior made it
possible for others to assume that Olsen also believed, deep down, that he knew better
what the less sophisticated customer really wanted.