Reflection on Leading Organizations in Culturally Diverse Environments

This essay provides a reflective analysis of leading organizations in culturally diverse settings and uncertain environments, drawing upon insights from lectures, readings, and personal experiences. It emphasizes the importance of understanding organizational culture, which encompasses the values, beliefs, and assumptions that shape employee behavior. The essay highlights Australia's multicultural context and the leadership strategies required to manage cultural differences effectively, such as promoting teamwork, leading by example, and fostering open communication. It also explores models for analyzing cultural and environmental adaptation, including individualism, uncertainty avoidance, and power distance. The conclusion underscores the role of dynamic leadership in navigating diverse and uncertain environments to achieve organizational goals. Desklib is your go-to platform for accessing similar solved assignments and past papers.

Running head: REFLECTIVE ESSAY
REFLECTIVE ESSAY
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

1REFLECTIVE ESSAY
Introduction
Organizational culture in truest sense portrays the values, beliefs and assumptions that
govern the behavior of the people or employees within the organization. Thus organizational
culture denotes those behavior on which the psychological and social environment of a
business depends. The creation of knowledge among the employees along spreading such
knowledge with other members of the organization and their perspective towards resistance
to a change is influenced through organizational culture (Alvesson and Sveningsson 2015).
Thus it is the assimilated values, principles, beliefs, vision, language, habits of the employees
of the organization. Therefore, these values and beliefs of the employees shapes their
appearances, attitude and work performance. There are numerous benefits of a good
organizational culture, the principal benefits are delivering better values to the customers,
efficient and consistent performance of the employees, instilling cohesiveness among the
teams, enhancing the morale of the employees, helping the organization in gaining a
competitive edge and establishing a strong alignment directed towards achievement of the
predetermined goals and many more.

2REFLECTIVE ESSAY
Description
Australia is one country that is known for its diverse cultures which is reflected on the
employees working in different organizations (Ang and Van Dyne 2015). The Australian
population is characterized with 46% people either born in foreign land or have one of their
parents born outside Australia. Owing to this every organizations in Australia suffers from
diverse cultural settings. The cultural differences can be handled efficiently with the help of
an effective leadership. Firstly, Teamwork can be achieved by sharing the responsibilities of
the employees. Secondly, the leader should lead others by setting an example through
himself. Thirdly, to achieve equal participation from all, celebrations should be done relating
to all cultures. Fourthly, the communication within the organization should be clear which
can be achieved through openness of mind and many more. With the expansion and growth
of an organization management and leadership challenges grows manifold. The cultural and
environmental adaptation effectiveness can be well analyzed with the help of the following
models:
Individualism: This model identifies whether the employees imagine themselves being a
part of the organization or they are more interested in personal goals fulfilment (Hogan and
Coote 2014).
Uncertainty avoidance: There are organizations where employees want to get everything
mentioned very clearly without any surprises like Bureaucratic organizations where
everything is managed by predetermined rules (Sarooghi, Libaers and Burkemper 2015).
Power distance: Power distance is the distance created between some employees within an
organization owing to gaining of power by few people in respect to their position in the
hierarchy. Organization where there this power distance id low, other employees think that
the power is earned rather than acquired in respect of their position and vice-versa.

3REFLECTIVE ESSAY
Conclusion
It can be concluded from the above discussion, that the behavior of the employees,
their attitude, beliefs, values, productivity are the exuberance of the organizational culture
they are part of. The cultures in each organizations are different from the other owing to
presence of diverse people from diverse cultural backgrounds and it is the role of a dynamic
leader to lead an organization through uncertain environments and culturally diverse setting
following well established models.

4REFLECTIVE ESSAY
References
Alvesson, M. and Sveningsson, S., 2015. Changing organizational culture: Cultural change
work in progress. Routledge.
Ang, S. and Van Dyne, L., 2015. Conceptualization of cultural intelligence: Definition,
distinctiveness, and nomological network. In Handbook of cultural intelligence (pp. 21-33).
Routledge.
Hogan, S.J. and Coote, L.V., 2014. Organizational culture, innovation, and performance: A
test of Schein's model. Journal of Business Research, 67(8), pp.1609-1621.
Sarooghi, H., Libaers, D. and Burkemper, A., 2015. Examining the relationship between
creativity and innovation: A meta-analysis of organizational, cultural, and environmental
factors. Journal of business venturing, 30(5), pp.714-731.