The Role of Leadership in Shaping Organizational Culture - Assignment Example

The Role of Leadership in Shaping Organizational Culture Leadership entails understanding the leadership roles in an organization where strong leaders are identified by how they execute leadership roles using their personal skills. Leadership serves as the determinant of company’s performance, employee affairs, organizational culture, and the vision and goals of the organization. Leaders influence the organizational culture where all employees adhere and adjust to the changes made especially on the organization operations. Shaping organizational culture requires that the leadership engage in a methodology where organizations culture is transformed from top to bottom level of the organization (Pfister, 2009). Shaping organization culture is essential if the organization leadership aims at having a healthy and high performing organization culture. Since culture involves the unwritten and written rules of how people would work with each other to achieve organizational objectives. This paper attempts to outline the role of leadership in an organization by shaping its culture. Organizational culture is integral in ensuring that the organization identify and execute strategic plans. Successful leaders ensure that they shape the culture of the organization instead of letting the culture to shape the organization. Culture shaping involves strategies that can promote an integrated system in the organization from top to bottom. To ensure that the performance and growth of the company adheres to the organization goals, the leaders must ensure that there is behavior change among individuals and teams in the organization. It is therefore necessary that personal transformation serve as the foundation of culture transformation (House, 2006).  Leaders shape and influence the organizational culture through molding of values, beliefs within the organization and basic assumptions by the members of the organizations. The key and critical factor for a manager to ensure that there is enough support organization culture is empowering the employees to build a good relationship that would lead to change in organizational culture. Effective leaders engage formation of strategies that would shape the organizational culture through influencing members to a positive relationship within the organizational program. Leaders who are intelligent learn on changing the organizational culture and focus more on empowering the people to enhance good relations. There are several strategies that can be used by managers to ensure positive organization culture is applied (Wells, 2013).  The first strategy involves the fact that a manager or a leader should become a mover where they use various techniques to ensure creativity and energy in organization. Techniques like mentorship, vision guiding, empowering employees, and acting as a role model influence individuals to change their behaviors and thus they play an integral part of effective leadership. Mentorship can be essential where one is supposed to gain some knowledge expertise and experience in a certain area. Vision-guiding approach to different employees can help them to focus more on their creativity and motivation in their roles. Acting as a role model serves as a tool for employee to engage in ethical behaviors, value-based character and standards of conduct as employee looks to the leader as a model (Pfister, 2009).  Empowerment is another important strategy used by managers and other leaders to enhance culture change in an organization. Empowerment is tool that enhances energy and creativity among different employees. It ensures collective effect of performance and leadership and leaders compel their employees to believe that through empowerment they become part of leadership. Through empowerment, four elements arise where people feel significant, learning and competence is enhanced, people become part of a community, and work get exciting. Through empowerment, employees get motivated because they feel they can control some part of organization. Empowerment encourages employees to take full responsibility of their actions and situations within the organization. Empowerment serves as a good way of promoting positive organization culture since people conduct themselves with sense of personal control and power, flexibility, and trust for those serving in leadership positions. Empowerment also engages employees in the decision-making process of the organization and this serves as an important part of change in organizational culture (National Research Council, 2003). Fostering good communication leads to change in organization culture. Communication is an important part of organization process and culture. Communication enhances efficiency and effectiveness in production as coordination as well as collaboration among employees. An effective leadership is attributed to good communication process and once an organization is able to undertake clear communication programs, it is more likely to experience better production in any of its operation areas. Communication enhances relationship in organization and people get to interact easily due to the fact that managers empower people and foster unity in the organization when there is effective communication (House, 2006). Effective communication in organization allows employees and managers to work together towards achieving organizational goals where departments coordinate well to enhance efficiency in production. Managers foster positive organization culture by ensuring the top to bottom communication is enhanced as well as horizontal communication and upward communication strategy. Effective communication promotes trust among members of the organization and encourages collaboration as well as empowering employees where they contribute to the building organization goals by contributing ideas and creativity for the organization. When an organization has a good communication strategy, it is more likely to change its organization culture in a positive way (Schein, 2010).  Managers foster better relations through building trust which is a critical component in enhancing better organization culture. When leaders create an environment where they can be accessed, they listen actively to the needs of employees and keep in touch with various issues affecting employees and the organization. They build a positive organization culture where employees can trust them and consult them without feeling intimidated. When employees learn that they can trust their leaders on the affairs of the organizations and personal challenges, they get motivated to share their experiences with the managers and they engage in a communication process with the managers. This shapes the organization culture by encouraging employees to be free and open to the managers (Woodside, 2008).  One of the most significant roles that managers undertake to shape the organization culture is management of conflict in the organization. Reaction of leaders to crisis forms a certain impact on the organization culture. The first step towards conflict management is to understand the cause and dynamics of the conflict. Leaders possess the skills to detect conflict and also methods of solving such conflicts. Conflict management helps to evaluate and improve the organization culture as problem solving is a major element in organization culture. Conflict management requires effective communication and also acts as part of communication process. Leaders attempt to ensure that the organizational culture and programs run properly by employing measures that can lead to conflict resolution and management of organization activities (Hansen, 2010). Conflict management ensures collaboration between the leaders and the parties involved in the conflict and thus it acts as a way of creating an environment for creativity and as an opportunity for members to share experiences. Managers therefore view conflict as an opportunity to enhance the relationships in the organization and thus they are always ready to undertake and conflict management actions (Pfister, 2009).  When managing conflict, leaders begin with the knowledge of various issues that lead to conflict in the organization. They understand that conflict is promoted by such factors like communication failures or misunderstandings, value differences, lack of interest or spirit to cooperate, conflict in job roles and also responsibilities, authority issues and differences in approaches to work. The managers therefore work towards resolving the challenging issues that lead to the conflict based on the cause of the conflict. Managers therefore apply various strategies such as defining the problem leading to conflict, generating many solutions that can be used to solve the problem, acting on a specific plan, and testing the idea or solution that seems to be the best in solving the problem at hand. Leaders undertake an analysis on the conflicts and determine what effects the conflict has on the organization culture. If the conflict leads to negative organization culture, the leaders have to employ measures that will transform the organization culture by solving such conflicts (Singh, 2010).  Organization culture is defined by what the leader wants and the system he believes is the most appropriate in shaping the organization culture. When leaders want to change or shape the organizational culture, they have to define what kind of culture they want to adopt. Mostly the system or organization culture approach is based on such factors like open communication, support, clear goals, participation, performance, change and rules. These factors help the managers to shape the organization culture where they apply the factors that are likely to impact on the organization culture positively. The main elements involved when managing and shaping organization culture include what leaders believe in or pay attention to, how leaders behave, allocation of rewards by managers and how they hire and fire individuals (Nagelkerk and Huber, 2006).  In consideration to what managers pay attention to, beliefs and values as well as priorities form the part of the organization culture as outlined by the managers. These elements determine the attitude of the manager on the operations of the organization through enhancing measures, controls and strategies that shape the organization culture in a certain way. If the leaders is consistent in how they apply the controls and measures, the organization performance is likely to grow positively which will also reflect a positive organizational culture. Inconsistent in application of measures and controls that form values and beliefs of the manager leads to mistrust and inconsistency in performance and thus the organization culture is negatively shaped (Martin, 2004).  The behavior of the managers shapes the organization culture in many ways. Leaders demonstrate such elements like role model concept, coaching, teaching and reinforcing values and positive behavior to the employees. Staff members look up on their leaders for many issues like guidance, coaching, mentorship and others and thus leaders should ensure that their behaviors impact positively on the values of their employees. Leaders who focus on improving the organization culture encourage their employees to adopt positive behaviors by demonstrating positive values and beliefs on organization operations and employee affairs. Further, the concept of rewarding employees and other individuals in the organization on their efforts to uphold positive value for development of organization culture is crucial. Leaders who reward their employees thus encouraging behaviors lead to positive attitude among the employees and consequently shape the organization culture. The motivation from such activities leads to higher productivity and encouraging performance. This serves as one of the ways of empowering and encouraging employees in the organizational. It promotes decision-making by all members, creativity and introduction of new ideas. Coordination of activities become easier and a positive organization culture is generated (Woodside, 2008).  Hiring and firing of employees form part of organization culture. Leaders reinforce and promote culture in the organization by ensuring recruitment and selection of new members in the organization. The perception of the applicants on the culture of the organization is influenced by what they learn on the media, advertisements and through the interviews. New recruits are also likely to adjust with the organization culture as soon as they join the organization and they can bring changes in the organization that are like to influence the organization culture in a positive way. Most leaders hire employees who are recommendations from other sources and thus such employees are likely to be conversant with the organization culture and values that the company upholds dearly. Therefore the company gets an addition of employees who are compatible with organization culture and also can bring new inventions and creativity that can change the organization systems and procedures (Hansen, 2010).  In conclusion, leadership plays the biggest role in shaping the organizational culture. Managers or leaders focus their energy on shaping the organization culture through various ways such as ensuring effective communication, controlling the values and beliefs in the organization, empowering employees, conflict management and encouraging performance in the organization. Leaders act as the pillars of the organization and they influence employees to engage in the right activities that are based on the values and beliefs of the organization culture. Leaders also enhance positive culture by demonstrating positive behaviors like empowerment, coaching, mentorship and such behavior lead to role model aspect and promote positive culture too. References Hansen, E. G. (2010). Responsible leadership systems: An empirical analysis of integrating corporate responsibility into leadership systems. Wiesbaden: Gabler. House, R. J. (2006). Culture, leadership, and organizations: The GLOBE study of 62 societies. Thousand Oaks, Calif. [u.a.: Sage Publ. Martin, J. 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