Leadership and Organisational Culture (7202BA04XY)
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Summary Leadership and Organizational Culture: Part 1
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Course
Leadership and Organisational Culture (7202BA04XY)
Institution
Universiteit Van Amsterdam (UvA)
This summary includes all lecture materials from the UvA course ''Leadership and Organizational Culture: Part 1''.
Contents include:
- Introduction to leadership, organizations and organizational culture.
- The trait, behavior, and contingency approach to leadership
- Power and influence: Emp...
Leadership and Organisational Culture (7202BA04XY)
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Leadership and Organizational Culture
Rule of thumb for studying articles for this course:
A leader is a pioneer, and is no one without followers. Leadership is influence. Leadership can be a role but
also a process.
According to Yukl and Gardner:
Why does leadership exist?
People live in groups.
- A leader may serve as a means to solve the classic coordination problem of group movement.
- Furthermore, as groups grow, conflict resolution and deciding on punishment becomes important.
- Another important function is managing intergroup relations to protect the interests of your group
while taking into account interests of other groups.
Magee and Galinski talk about the social hierarchy to understand how people emerge as leaders. A social
hierarchy is:
A hierarchy can be formal or informal:
- In the formal hierarchy you have more power and probably a monetary recognition for the role.
- In the informal hierarchy, for example, someone is more liked than others, or has more expertise.
If people want to be as egalitarian as possible, hierarchies still develop. A hierarchy creates social order and
facilitates coordination as a consequence.
In an organization, it is really important because it motivates individuals. It can also satisfy people’s sense
of control.
Power is having control over others, and status is a characteristic given by others.
A person with power may not have status. However, power may lead to status. But it is not necessarily the
case. Status may also lead to power.
,Important to remember: informal leaders are respected more and formal leaders often have less status.
Two fundamental paradigms are: leader emergence and leader effectiveness.
Criteria for leader success can be monetary (i.e. organizational income) but also employees turnover and
absenteeism. There are also subjective measures such as personal liking of employees. You can also look at
team or group success.
Organizational culture determines how people behave in an organization. Leaders and founders have a
huge role in developing an organizational culture.
An organization is defined as a group of people working together to attain some common goals under a
certain structure.
A more precise definition:
Organizations also may have differences in terms of reasons for existence. The fundamental reason is to
exist per-se.
The cost needs at least to equal the profit. The organizations need to maximize profit. An organization goes
beyond money: a culture and a fulfilment of social responsibilities are important, and also welfare of
employees.
Organizations can be defined through metaphors.
Morgan (1986) defines organizations through many different metaphors:
, • An organization as a machine emphasizes the fact that organizations are made of subsystems that
are interrelated in a logical order. People are parts of the machine, and if they do not fit they shall
be replaced.
• Organizations are like an organism that has to survive by adapting to its environment that is always
changing.
• As a brain: organizations are a depository of knowledge, a collective intelligence. It is designed to
process information and learn overtime.
• Like a cultural system: it is like a mini-society, defined by the norms and rituals of its members.
• As a political system emphasizes the power distribution.
• As an instrument of domination: emphasizes exploitation and domination of organizations.
The organism metaphor is the most relevant for our approach.
The cycle perspective sees an organization as a system that develops until decline and death. There are
different stages, and unlike human beings organizations can have a recovery stage and not die.
1. The entrepreneurial stage is the infancy of organizations. The founder now has a crucial role for
the survival of the organizations: he has to gather resources to ensure survival. There is no
structure usually.
2. In the collectivity stage, the organization is still young, but survival chances are now higher. The
organization is doing an effort to clarify its identity. Although there is some structure in place, there
still is a lot of informality as regards how things are done in the organization.
3. In the formalization and control stage, everything becomes more formalised. The role of the
founder now becomes less important.
4. Elaboration of structure stage: the organization has a large size and is big. The organization is a
rigid bureaucracy with a complex structure in place. It requires a lot of resources to ensure survival
and always has to keep up to date with the changing environment. Decision making is now very
formal and very decentralized.
5. The decline stage (or recovery stage) occurs when the organization is put in a crisis state: it has to
reinvent itself or make sure it does not end to exist. There may be unfavourable market conditions,
or poor leadership styles. At this stage, the best talent is leaving the company, there is a shortage
of resources and there is disagreement about the methods the organization uses to operate.
A specific example:
There is no fixed timeline for these stages: every organization may differ in their timing.
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