• Thursday, March 28, 2024
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BusinessDay

How leadership influences corporate culture and office politics

organisation

Culture is a vital fabric of every organisation. It is to an organisation what personality is to a person. What defines the relationship and behaviour between people within an organisation is the prevalent culture at play. To understand the prevailing environment in an organisation, one must observe carefully what the prevalent culture is. The organization’s culture sets the tone for the kind of politics and conflict that will be at play within the organisation.

And while the prevalent culture in an organisation is mostly a conglomeration of the different personalities in it—the personal life experiences the individuals in the organisation are bringing into it— the leadership and leadership style has so much influence on the kind of culture at play in the organisation. Leadership has so much influence on organisational conflict, it defines the prevalent culture, and culture sets the tone for politics and conflicts at work. Therefore, the onus has always rested on leadership to provide direction for the organisation and define its culture.

Consciously or not, every organisation creates a culture that influences the kind of politics and conflict at play in it.

An organisation’s culture comprises the values, beliefs, underlying assumptions, attitudes, and behaviours shared by the members of the organisation. Culture are those words, ideas, archetypes, customs, and rules that influence and shape how an organisation’s members think about and respond to conflict.

Culture is the behaviour that results when an organisation arrives at a set of rules for how they work and relate with each other. This set of rules are, however, mostly unwritten and unspoken. Instead, they are conventions that individuals in an organisation get assimilated into once they join.

Culture is the spirit of the organisation. And this spirit is influenced mainly by the leader’s personality and leadership style. Leadership, leadership style, and culture are inextricably connected. The leadership of an organisation sets the tone for its culture; leadership sets new culture and values in motion. It appears members of an organisation wait to take a cue from the leadership regarding how they relate with each other.

There are four generally accepted attributes of culture as discovered through the work of Edgar Schein et al. One is that culture is shared. It is a group phenomenon and not just something that exists solely with an individual in the organisation or an average of individual characteristics. Like I noted earlier, culture manifests in shared behaviours and values in organisations.

Another attribute of culture is that it is pervasive. What I mean by this is that culture permeates every level and layer of the organisation such that it could even be mistaken for the organisation itself. Culture is expressed in the collective behaviours, physical environment, group rituals, visible symbols, and stories. There are other aspects of culture that are unseen, such as mindset, motivations, unspoken actions, and action logics.

The other attribute of culture is that it is enduring. Culture influences the thoughts and behaviours of organisational members for a long period of time. In their article, The Leader’s Guide to Corporate Culture, Boris Groysberg et al. described culture as a self-reinforcing social pattern that grows increasingly resistant to change and outside influences.

The last attribute of culture is that it is implicit. Nonetheless, this implicit attribute of culture is instinctively wired to not only recognise but to respond to it as well.

Organisational conflict and politics are implicit. Everyone takes part in it, whether consciously or not. Passivity in organisational politics, for example, is a kind of politics on its own. “Turn on politics or politics will turn on you” are the popular words of Ralph Nader, and they hold so much truth. Culture is a nebulous idea; it is both visible and invisible, defined and undefined. Culture manifests in arrays of ways in an organisation; it comprises many elements like leadership behaviours, communication styles, the kind of politics at play, and corporate celebration. Some organisations have a conflict-avoiding culture. They strive to avoid conflict and confrontations. But this is not a healthy organisational culture because conflicts left unresolved may implode and result in internal disintegration and a full-blown crisis.

For leaders to influence culture, they must understand what culture is; they must also decipher what their organisation’s specific culture is. This is what makes leadership effective. According to Peter Drucker, Culture eats strategy for breakfast.

To understand an organization’s culture, its rules, both written and unwritten, should be examined alongside the relationships between members, the values that they share, and behaviours that its people display. An organisation’s culture is derived from assumptions about whether human nature is inherently good or bad. Are they proactive or active, do they like work or not, are they mutable or not? Answers derived from these assumptions shape how organisational members relate with each other or customers and everyone who has a relationship with the organisation.

The appropriate emotions which people should express are also queried. Which kind of emotions should be expressed in an organisation, and which ones should be suppressed? Effectiveness is also questioned; how do we measure effectiveness in an organisation? What are the metrics that guide us in knowing if an organisation and its members are effective?