ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE Organizational Culture and Leadership, 3rd Edition

408 ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE AND LEADERSHIPnormal functions, so leaders must provide or create the toxinabsorption and elimination function if their organizations are to becapable of learning.The difficult learning agenda for founder leaders is how to besimultaneously clear and strong in articulating their vision andopen to change as that very vision becomes maladaptive in a turbulentenvironment.Leadership at Organizational MidlifeOnce the organization develops a substantial history of its own, itsculture becomes more of a cause than an effect. The culture nowinfluences the strategy, the structure, the procedures, and the waysin which the group members will relate to each other. Culture becomesa powerful influence on members’ perceiving, thinking, andfeeling, and these predispositions, along with situational factors,will influence the members’ behavior. Because it serves an importantanxiety-reducing function, culture will be clung to even if itbecomes dysfunctional in relationship to environmental opportunitiesand constraints.Midlife organizations show two basically different patterns, however.Some, under the influence of one or more generations ofleaders, develop a highly integrated culture even though they havebecome large and diversified; others allow growth and diversificationin cultural assumptions as well and therefore can be describedas culturally diverse with respect to their business, functional, geographical,and even hierarchical subunits. How leaders manage cultureat this stage of organizational evolution depends on whichpattern they perceive and which pattern they decide is best for thefuture.Leaders at this stage need, above all, the insight and skill to helpthe organization evolve into whatever will make it most effectivein the future. In some instances this may mean increasing culturaldiversity, allowing some of the uniformity that may have been builtup in the growth stage to erode; in other instances it may mean