ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE Organizational Culture and Leadership, 3rd Edition

HOW LEADERS EMBED AND TRANSMIT CULTURE 271they become primary maintenance mechanisms—what we ultimatelycall institutionalization or bureaucratization. The more effectivethey are in making the organization successful, the morethey become the filter or criteria for the selection of new leaders. Asa result, the likelihood of new leaders becoming cultural changeagents declines as the organization matures. The socializationprocess then begins to reflect what has worked in the past, not whatmay be the primary agenda of the current leadership. The dynamicsof the “midlife” organization are, therefore, quite different fromthose of the young and emerging organization, as will be shown inthe following chapters.Though the leadership examples in this chapter come primarilyfrom founders, any manager can begin to focus on these mechanismswhen attempting to teach subordinates some new ways ofperceiving, thinking, and feeling. What the manager must recognizeis that all of the primary mechanisms must be used, and all ofthem must be consistent with each other. Many change programsfail because the leader who wants the change fails to use the entireset of mechanisms described. To put it positively, when a managerdecides to change the assumptions of a work group by using all ofthese mechanisms, that manager is becoming a leader.