ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE Organizational Culture and Leadership, 3rd Edition

THE CONCEPT OF ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE 11itself. On the one hand, cultural norms define how a given nationor organizations will define leadership—who will get promoted,who will get the attention of followers. On the other hand, it canbe argued that the only thing of real importance that leaders do isto create and manage culture; that the unique talent of leaders istheir ability to understand and work with culture; and that it is anultimate act of leadership to destroy culture when it is viewed asdysfunctional.If one wishes to distinguish leadership from management oradministration, one can argue that leadership creates and changescultures, while management and administration act within a culture.By defining leadership in this manner, I am not implying thatculture is easy to create or change, or that formal leaders are theonly determiners of culture. On the contrary, as we will see, culturerefers to those elements of a group or organization that are most stableand least malleable.Culture is the result of a complex group learning process that isonly partially influenced by leader behavior. But if the group’s survivalis threatened because elements of its culture have becomemaladapted, it is ultimately the function of leadership at all levelsof the organization to recognize and do something about this situation.It is in this sense that leadership and culture are conceptuallyintertwined.Toward a Formal Definition of CultureWhen we apply the concept of culture to groups, organizations, andoccupations, we are almost certain to have conceptual and semanticconfusion, because such social units are themselves difficult todefine unambiguously. I will use as the critical defining characteristicof a group the fact that its members have a shared history. Anysocial unit that has some kind of shared history will have evolved aculture, with the strength of that culture dependent on the lengthof its existence, the stability of the group’s membership, and theemotional intensity of the actual historical experiences they haveshared. We all have a commonsense notion of this phenomenon,