ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE Organizational Culture and Leadership, 3rd Edition

182 ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE AND LEADERSHIPsuperiors and subordinates than do people in low-power-distancecountries, such as Denmark, Israel, and Austria. If one looks at thesame index by occupation, one finds higher power distance amongunskilled and semiskilled workers than among professional andmanagerial workers, as would be expected.These dimensions also reflect even deeper cultural assumptionsabout the nature of the self. For example, Redding and Martyn-Johns (1979) point out that Western and Asian societies have strikinglydifferent core concepts of the self. Asians are less focused ondifferentiating the individual from the group and therefore put lessemphasis on self-actualization as a core personality process, whereasWesterners have developed strong concepts of the individual andthe self as something potentially quite distinct from the group andsomething to be developed in its own right. In some cultures theself is compartmentalized, so that work, family, and leisure involvedifferent aspects of the self; in other cultures the self is more of awhole, and even the idea of separating work from family does notmake any sense. The core question of identity and role is thus answeredin very different ways in different cultures.At the organizational level, assumptions about relationshipswill, of course, reflect the assumptions of the wider culture, but theybecome elaborated and differentiated. The founder/leader maybelieve that the only way to run an organization is to assign individualtasks, hold individuals accountable for performance, andminimize group and cooperative work because that would only leadto lowest-common-denominator group solutions or, worse, diffusionof responsibility. Another leader might emphasize cooperation andcommunication among subordinates as the best means of solvingproblems and implementing solutions because that would lead tothe level of teamwork that task accomplishment requires. Thesetwo leaders would develop quite different working styles, whichwould be reflected ultimately in the organization’s processes, rewardsystems, and control systems.DEC reduced the power distance between superiors and subordinatesas much as possible, building on the assumption that good ideas