Assignment Developing Organization Culture

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Part 1- 864 words
Part 2- 803 words
Part 3- 913 words
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1. Understand an organisation's ethical and value-based approach to leadership.
As suggested by Edgar Schein, modern managers faces a lot of leadership issues. For
example, when managers try to change the behavior of subordinates, they often encounter
“resistance to change” at a level that cannot be explained in terms of logic. The reason for these
problems is that most managers do not take into consideration the power of organizational
culture and values. Schein revealed that organizational culture and values shapes how
leadership should be carried1. Each organization is a complex organism, the basis of the vital
potential of which is culture - norms, values and attitudes accepted and shared by employees.
Organizational culture is a powerful source of both increasing and decreasing the effective
activity of an enterprise. Corporate culture - corporate relations in an organization are most
effective in modern conditions. When an organization’s culture coincides with its main goal, it
becomes an important factor in organizational and leadership effectiveness. It becomes a
strategic tool that guides, mobilizes initiative and ensures the interaction of departments and
individual employees. Each organization can be analyzed and described in detail on the basis of
such properties as direction, structure, individual autonomy, management support, support and
incentive, conflict and risk management2.
Edgar Schein identifies three levels of organizational culture: superficial, considering
products and services provided by the organization, used technologies and architecture of
premises and offices, observing behavior and language communication, the internal level,
subjecting the study of values and beliefs, reflected in symbols and language, and the third,
deep, including such basic pre provisions as an attitude to being in general, a perception of time
and space, a general attitude to work and people. Some researchers offer a more detailed
1 M. Saunders, P. Lewis, A. Thornhill,
Research Methods for Business Students. New Jersey:
Prentice Hall. 2009.
2 C. Schoel, M. Bluemke, P. Mueller, & D. Stahlberg, ‘When autocratic leaders become an
option uncertainty and self-esteem predict implicit leadership preferences.’
Journal of
personality and Social Psychology, vol. 101, no.3, 2011, pp 521.
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structure of organizational culture, consisting of a worldview, organizational values, behavior
style, norms, psychological climate in the organization. Organizational culture is a procedure of
organizational socialization, something that is comprehended month after month by each new
employee who comes to the organization.
When differences in the worldview of workers have significant differences,
intraorganizational contradictions and conflicts may occur. In order to achieve some mutual
understanding and take different positions, it is important to understand that changing a
person’s worldview is very difficult and requires considerable effort, since not everyone can
verbally express the basic principles of his or her behavior.
Assessment criteria 1.2: Discuss the impact of organisational specific, legal, regulatory
and ethical requirements on leadership demands.
It should be noted that performance and management of organizations are influenced by
internal and external factors. External factors are those factors which organization have less
control on them. These include legal, regulatory, economic and even social factors. Legal
factors regulate the way managers carry out their leadership. For example, if there is a law that
says that businesses should be closed at 5 pm, then managers will have to abide by such law
even if they had plans for working overtime.
Like legal requirements, regulations force managers to operate as per the rules and not
as per their will. If regulation discourage child labor, then managers will have to avoid any case
of child labor. Similarly, ethical requirement shapes the powers, freedom and decision-making
process of managers. If ethics requires managers to be honesty, then managers will have to
avoid fraudulent activities
Assessment criteria 1.3: Evaluate current and emerging social concerns and expectations
impacting on leadership in the organisation.
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Social factors represent one of the external influences to organizational performance and
leadership. Some of the emerging social concern are due to increased awareness of consumers
and community members3. As a result, companies are indebted with a lot of social expectation.
These expectations include the need for companies to support the community within which the
company’s premises is located. Other expectations include the need for company to produce
safer and healthier products. These expectations change the leadership in the organization. In
fact, many social concerns have forced companies such as Nike to adjust their leadership
strategies in developing nations. Nike, for example, was once accused of poor management of
its overseas branches. The company was reported to offer poor working conditions. It was
referred to as a sweatshop. In response, there was a public backlash. Such backlash can
negatively affect the performance of a company. It creates bad image and this may force
consumers to boycott the company’s product4.
The only way of addressing such social concerns is to change the management
approach. In a work environment composed of hierarchical separate departments, change
management is a new condition for leadership success. The market, with its fickle consumers
and employees experiencing a personality crisis, requires a successful leader to have more
patience, poise, time to think and the ability to easily find opportunities. Market competition is
developing so fast that leaders are struggling to keep up with the lead; unsuccessful attempts to
ensure and maintain organizational readiness turn out to be expensive. Thus, the demand for
leadership that is ready and able to solve the problems of change management is high and is
already in short supply.
3 M. Singh, ‘Closing the gap between strategy and execution: Better alignment enables
successful strategy execution, improves overall performance, and delivers financial
returns.’ PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. 2014.
4 L. Yang, G. H. Sun, & M. Eppler, ‘Making strategy work: a literature review on the factors
influencing strategy implementation.’ Handbook of research on Strategy Process, 2009, pp:
165-181.
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