Organisational Culture and Leadership - Essay Example

It is characterized by a range of factors such as novelty, risk taking, attention to specific issues, result, people and team orientation, hostility and steadiness. One may also find different strata of culture within the same institute. The leading culture is expressed in the centre principles that are shared by a bulk of the organization’s affiliates. Core values are the primary or dominant values that are accepted throughout the organization. However, there may be various subcultures or small cultures in a business unit, characterised by sector-based title and physical parting.

The culture is passed on from one generation to other through stories, rites, substance codes and expression of the organisation. Culture describes the frontier between one association and another by assigning a sense of individuality to its members. It augments the steadiness of the social system by making possible the creation of commitment to anything bigger than self-interest. Besides it serves as a sense-making and control mechanism for fitting employees in the organization. 2. Leadership 2.1. Meaning Leadership is defined as the skill to persuade a group towards the attainment of goals.

The trends in leadership studies reveal a plethora of the different aspects of leadership and yet there is no universally accepted definition or model of a leader. The first dominant framework on leadership was the Trait Theory or the “Great Men” Theory which was proposed in the early twentieth century. The theory considers “personality, social, physical or intellectual traits to differentiate leaders from non-leaders” (Shoup, 2005, p.2). This theory ascribes conventional qualities like ambition and energy, honesty and integrity, self-confidence, intelligence and knowledge to leaders and holds that leaders are born, not made.

Mid-twentieth century saw the rise of the Behaviourist school of leadership which emphasized on the actions and dominant behaviour of the leaders and highlighted the leaders’ behaviour on the job, use of authority and task-relationship orientation. Later, scholars such as Fred Fiedler realised that a leader must match his/her situation and leadership style should vary depending on the situation and context. This gave way to a third phase of leadership studies, known as the Contingency school, which focussed on job constitution, leader-member association and power position.

(Shoup, 2005, pp. 2-4) Later James McGregor Burns brought about a marked transition through his classification of the transactional and transformational leader. He defined transactional leader are one who superficially deals with a situation by hovering around the edges of the problem and transformational leader as one who sees a problem as an opportunity to change the world through his visionary ideas and experiments. (Polelle, 2008, p. xii) 2.2. Importance Leaders act as connections between the association and external regions.

During difficult times, they serve as troubleshooters by engaging in negotiation and conflict management. Besides, they provide essential advice, coaching and mentoring to their subordinates to improve upon their individual, team and overall organizational performance. 3. Relationship between Organisational Culture and Leadership Leadership and organizational culture are two inter-related and inter-dependent concepts. Culture is socially learned and transmitted by members within organizations.

 The leaders of an organization