How Does Culture Shape Leadership

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The research evidence supports the theory that leadership helps shape culture; culture in turn shapes leadership and they both drive performance. Schein (2010) asserts that cultures begin with leaders who impose their own values and assumptions on a group. If that group is successful and the assumptions come to be taken for granted, we then have a culture that will define for later generations of members what kinds of leadership are acceptable. The culture now defines leadership. But as the group runs into adaptive difficulties, as its environment changes to the point where some of its assumptions are no longer valid, leadership comes into play once more. The leadership is now the ability to step outside the culture that created the leader …show more content…

He illustrates this inter-connection by looking at the relationship between leadership and culture in the context of the organizational life cycle. Thus, during the process of organizational formation, the founder of a company creates an organization which reflects their values and beliefs. In this sense, the founder creates and shapes the cultural traits of their organization. Moreover, as the organization develops and time passes, the created culture of the organization exerts an influence on the leader and shapes the actions and style of the leader. Through this dynamic ongoing process, the leader creates and is in turn shaped by the organizational culture. In summarizing the consensus of opinion on the links between organizational culture and leadership, Bass and Avolio (1993) mirror the argument of Schein (2010) by suggesting that the relationship …show more content…

A number of comparative studies conducted during 1990s on the culture-performance link showed that certain culture orientations are conducive to performance (Kotter & Heskett, 1992). In their research, Xenikou and Simosi (2006) suggested that transformational qualities lead to performance beyond expectations in organizational settings; and cited other research conducted that empirically demonstrated that there is a relation between transformational leadership attributes and organizational measures of effectiveness. The study hypothesized that transformational leadership is related to performance through its effect on organizational culture and that transformational leadership was expected to have an indirect positive effect on performance via achievement, humanistic, and adaptive cultural orientations (Xenikou & Simosi, 2006). The findings indicate that transformational leadership leads to an achievement cultural orientation and suggest that transformational leadership stimulates

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