How A Knowledge and Appreciation of Organizational

Introduction

In a modern organizational environment, change is highly inevitable. Contemporary managers and leaders continuously encounter the need for radicle and unpredictable changes that must be made for the organizations to gain stability and achieve their objectives (Adair, 2002). Different events have led to extensive disruptions in many organizations, causing some of them to go bankrupt, downscale operations or close forever. Therefore, according to Bolden et al (2016), contemporary leaders must appreciate change and learn how to deal with it. This entails understanding the role of leadership styles and organizational culture in facilitating a successful implementation of change that is accepted across the organization. This essay seeks to validate the statement that ‘leading through change can happen effectively only if a full understanding and appreciation of organizational culture is progressively developed’.

Organizational culture determines an organization’s effectiveness by influencing staff’s behaviour and style. For instance, an innovative organizational culture can promote and stimulate an innovative behaviour among the staffs, enhancing the quality of products and services offered by the organization (Bolden et al. 2011). This represents a combination of innovative staff and managers who effectively utilise their innovativeness to improve organizational outcomes. Furthermore, leadership knowledge, skills and abilities are important tools that leaders can use to sustainably generate competitive advantages, to fulfil their leadership responsibilities and adopt to changes in the business environment (Grint, 2010). This manuscript explores the concept of leadership and organizational culture, evaluating how a knowledge and appreciation of organizational culture can facilitate effective organizational change.

Drawing from the assertions by Jackson & Parry (2011), leadership and culture are interlinked so much so that it is plausible to claim that leaders can effectively introduce change if they have a good understanding of organizational culture and ultimately influence organizational performance. As such, leadership must be accorded a special attention especially in the context of organizational change management.

The Concept of Leadership

Since time immemorial, various definitions have emerged, reflecting the leader-follower notion. For instance, the concept of leadership in the 1920s was synonymous to leaders who ‘impressed’ their followers, compared to those in 1940s who were known to ‘persuade’ followers. In the contemporary society though, leaders are often known to ‘influence’ their followers (Roe, 2014). Nonetheless, a more recent definition of leadership by Al-Ali et al (2017) supports the notion that leadership is a multifaceted process of identifying a mutually negotiated goal and motivating people to support its achievement.

As such, leaders are known to influence employee’s behaviour and motivate them to work towards achieving the organizational goal, while at the same time, helping the employees achieve their career and personal goals (Western, 2013). In this regard, Farrell (2018) argues that motivated employees are one of the most significant evidence of effective leadership. This claim is supported by Metwally et al (2019) who observed that effective leaders are identified by the extent to which their followers are motivated; which can lead to effective organizational change and superior performance.

While leading a team towards achieving organizational goals, leaders stick to organizational shared mission, vision and shared values (Sinaga et al, 2018). However, Sinaga et al (2018) opposed this argument by claiming that leaders do not always stick to organizations vision and values but instead, they focus on change by influencing employees to shift their focus to the right direction, make commitment and align to mutual development.

However, for leaders to effectively produce change, they must engage in two sets of actions: the inside actions and outside actions. The former entails imagining and planning the change, making decisions and clarifying values while the latter entails inducing employees to act and accept the change (Tortorella et al, 2021). Therefore, leaders create change by developing and promoting the vision that motivates others to work towards a shared aspiration. This illustrates that leaders are agents of change who have the responsibility of setting achievable goals for the intended change to be successfully achieved.

Leaders play a crucial role in contemporary organizations where predictability and consistency are less valued compared to innovation, enabling organizations to quickly adopt to changing business environments (Kuslina & Widjaja, 2018). For example, leaders are crucially responsible for driving new organizational initiatives that respond to changing business environment. However, Chong et al (2018) argued that leaders must consider organizational culture and how people respond to change because those two elements can influence the process of change; as explored in the next section.

The concept of organizational culture

Dhir (2019) defined organizational culture as the basic assumptions and patterns that a group of individuals within the organization have invented and developed, through learning, to cope with its challenges of internal integration and external adaption. This implies that these assumptions and patterns are valid and taught to every employee who joins the organization as a guidance to understand the best way to think and solve problems within the organization. Furthermore, according to Yaseen et al (2018), the assumptions are derived from employees’ experiences and are applied when evaluating organizational opportunities or solving problems. Therefore, organizational culture represents a social glue that reduces employee anxiety and uncertainty about their expected behaviour – basically explaining ‘how we do things around here’ (Tran, 2020).

Through organizational culture, employees have a set of rules on how to behave, what to do and what so say; and this promotes cohesiveness. According to Hnasen (2018), organizational cultures present in three layers namely: values, assumptions and artefacts. Values represent the beliefs, philosophies and standards that have intrinsic worth to the organization, while are the beliefs about human nature and reality that are taken for granted. Lastly, artefacts are the visible and tangible results of the organisation’s various activities (Hynes & Mickahil, 2019). It is therefore imperative for leaders to understand and appreciate organizational culture not only because they are the main principles that employees abide by, but also because any efforts to change them may cause resistance.

Alimudin & Sukoco (2017) explains further that understanding organizational culture can help leaders to effectively understand the underlying assumptions and values that motivate employees and influence their behaviour. Organizational culture can contribute to superior organizational performance because through a stronger organizational culture, leaders can easily predict employee reactions and minimize any undesired consequences. A typical example is Zara, a UK’s apparel and clothing shop where the founder had a full understanding of the organization’s culture of employees having the independence and power to create new models through personal creativity. The founder supports this culture by supporting group thinking and observing employee meetings to predict any undesired outcomes and enhance creative processes. This scenario illustrates the interconnectedness between organizational culture and leadership style; and how they are linked to organizational success. The company leadership not only supports this culture but also motivates employees at challenging times. In this regard though, it is important to understand the relationship between leadership and organizational culture; as well as how they contribute to an organization’s competitive advantage and success.

The symbiotic relationship between leadership and organizational culture

Leadership and organizational culture undeniably corelate. Just like leaders must understand an organization’s culture in order to work within that culture’s limits, their understanding of culture enables them to initiate organizational change (Xie, 2019). Grint (2010) observed that a leader’s values, beliefs and assumptions have a significant influence on the organization’s culture, which is further reinforced to employees through coaching, promotion and modelling to create new shared values for stimulating change. Similar remarks were made by Chong et al (2018), who strongly believe that leaders can induce employees’ commitment to change by reinforcing the organization culture’s core values, motivating them to embrace change.

Therefore, it is monumental for leaders to be at the forefront or organizational culture development, because employees mostly follow leaders’ behaviours. In the process, they notice even the smallest aspects of leadership such as what the leader is spending their time on or what is on their calendar schedules (Tortorella et al, 2021). Such mundane aspects of leadership reveal to employees what really counts as good or bad, as well as what behaviours are likely to be punished or rewarded. Furthermore, according to Metwally et al (2019), those micro moments evolve into macro situations that culminate into forming ideas of culture, atmospheres and situations. They reveal more to employees than just the printed versions of mission and vision statements. As such, leaders have the responsibility of regularly reviewing their behaviour in the background of the signals they are sending to employees in order to maintain a string and positive organizational culture. In this regard, Chong et al (2018) suggested that organizations can achieve strong and positive cultures if leaders motivate and energize employees by coordinating and shaping their behaviour.

Culture may exist as either something that can be manipulated or as an organizational variable. However, as per Yaseen et al (2018), the form, direction, and impact of that manipulation relies heavily on the leader’s abilities and skills. Ideally, people’s performance and productivity can be influenced by different leadership styles – in the process of initiating organizational change. For instance, whereas transformational leaders can change culture by understanding it and realigning it with new versions of shared values, norms and assumptions; transactional leaders tend to work with already existing cultures by following existing rules, norms and procedures (Sinaga et al, 2018). This notion is supported by Yaseen et al (2018), who argued that transformational leadership is more effective in initiating organizational change because those leaders seek to improve organizational performance by having clear goals that are aligned by the follower’s motives and ideas. Transformational leaders challenge the status quo by demonstrating to followers the problems and shortcomings of the current state of systems while bringing to life the vision what the new organization could be.

Different leadership scholars (e.g. Grint, 2010, Tortorella et al, 2021, Kuslina & Widjaja, 2018) have confirmed that transformational leadership can inspire and motivate employees to embrace change, demonstrate optimism and motivate employees to explore new perspectives and ways of solving organizational problems. However, it would be interesting to explore how organizational leaders can apply their knowledge about organizational culture to envision and implement change. This is well-explained in the next section.

The importance of organizational culture and leadership through change

Modern organizations are constantly changing their operations and management processes to match the changing business environment. Typically, this constant change is characterised by changing technology, introducing new management practices, adopting employees to new methods of work and matching up to new market trends (Sinaga et al, 2018). When dealing with such changes, the organizational culture can either impede or facilitate those changes. As earlier indicated, organizational culture consists of employee values, beliefs and norms that not only create a sense of belonging and identity for them but also a sense of security and certainty. Therefore, as Metwally et al (2019) observed, any change that interferes with the status quo or threatens culture can trigger immediate resistance from employees.

Chong et al (2018) argued that employees are more likely to embrace change if the organizational culture aligns to the company’s goals and mission. Whereas organizational leaders may impose a set of values that they assume represent the organizational culture, employees may have their own conceptualization of organizational culture and how the goals should be achieved (Kuslina & Widjaja, 2018). Therefore, it is vital for leaders to set the cultural aspect and create awareness to an extent that the employees are willing to embrace the change and identify the future triggers of resistance.

This can be illustrated by a scenario where a Bulgarian university intended to introduce Blackboard into its systems. Because the employees were used to delivering teaching materials through handouts and presentations, the University management decided to use Blackboard as a more efficient alternative. They envisioned that Blackboard would enhance the quality of teaching and promote productivity by allowing students to easily access learning materials from home.

But in order to reduce resistance, the university leadership gave teachers a few months to learn the system and use emails as an alternative way of sharing teaching materials. They then held regular meetings with the employees to evaluate their progress and offer any additional training that the employees needed. As such, the management was able to stimulate and encourage change by using current systems while maintaining a focus on productivity, innovation and student experience (Tsankov & Damyyanov, 2017).

A leader’s role in bringing change is to develop a planned approach and promoting consensus that the intended change is right and necessary. Considering the university library scenario, one would admit that it illustrates how having a clear understanding of organizational culture can facilitate an effective implementation of change; especially with the view of how the University leaders promoted a change initiation process that monitored both internal and external factors continually to ensure success.

Based on the Lewin’s Change Model (Hussain et al, 2018), the university leader ensured that the employees accepted the change by establishing a continuous communication system to gain feedback from employees on the newly introduced method of teaching. Afterward, the leader executed the change by allowing the employees to use alternative forms of digital teaching as the employees continued learning how to use the software. The leader later re-freezed the change so that the new technology could permanently be used for teaching.

This example offers a typical illustration of how leaders can energize, motivate employees to accept organizational change, and ensure that everyone is coping well with the change without any resistance. Ideally, the most important element of this change was the active participation of all the parties involved as it effectively ensured that no stakeholder resisted (Sinaga et al, 2018). On this note, Chong et al (2018) suggested that by demonstrating how an intended change will enhance organizational values, leaders can easily strike an agreement with employees to make them more accepting and open to change. This is evident in how the leader at the university demonstrated the need for a new software that would revolutionise how the staff taught in class and enhance the student’s innovative capabilities through efficiency and convenience.

Against this backdrop, it is plausible to argue that the leader in the University was a transformational leader with a postmodernist mindset because of how he tried to resonate with the employee’s social construction and identity to implement change. Following the assertions by Metwally et al (2019), a postmodernist mindset enables a leader to interact with a network of people and influence them towards a shared goal

Even though the university might have had liner goals when implementing the change, the transformational leader was aware of the organizational dynamics and the continuously changing perceptions of what those changes could represent. Therefore, the University, through its transformational leadership, was more flexible and adaptable with its employees’ needs. Clearly, the university leadership linked the intended change to the organization’s values, making the change more acceptable to employees; particularly by claiming that the intended change would contribute to a more positive organization in future.

Resistance to Change

Failure to understand organizational culture can cause resistance to change. Yaseen et al (2018) defined resistance to change as the unwillingness of inability to acceptor discuss organizational changes that are perceived to be threatening or damaging to an individual. An example of resistance to change presented in a Bulgarian interior design company, where the company ownership changed hands and the new owners introduced a new production and digital order system that completely ignored the knowledge, skills and competencies of the employees as well as the organizational culture (Universal Stroi, 2020).

Consequently, all the workers were required to work on their own, eliminating group thinking, consistency and creativity in their approach to production, and instead following the instruction given by the customers. According to Universal Stroi (2020), this type of change caused workers who had been in the company for 20 years complain, fail in their tasks, or leave due to poor designs and inability to perform tasks.

This scenario exemplifies a situation where employees resisted change due to lack of involvement in the change process and the leadership’s disregard to organizational culture in the process of implementing change (Levasseur, 2001). Probably, the employees in this organization perceived the change as a tool used by the management to change the status quo and make them lose their power.

As such, the change resistance in this case is created by the management’s move to use directive and centralist management approach to promote the optimization and efficiency of products so that they can meet the customer’s needs (Sinaga et al, 2018). However, one might argue that the leadership adopted a transactional leadership style, whereby the leader exercises his or her power from a high hierarchical position and takes all the decision-making owners while delegating only a little bit of the responsibilities to the employees. The leaders do not consider getting feedback from them nor motivating them to embrace the change (Canary & McPhee, 2011).

There are a variety of reasons why people resist change. However, in the case of the design company, the employees did not want to take the additional work given to them. They were also worried about the lack of skills needed to thrive in the organization after the change implementation or leaving the job because they were unable to thrive in the new environment. In short, the employee’s resistance to change is as a result of their habit to work in groups and use their creative abilities. Therefore, the proposed change made the employees feel insecure and fear the unknown.

In most cases, employees voice their resistance to change through demonstrations strikes or even resignation (Yaseen et al, 2018). But for the company to succeed in implementing the modernised system, it should have communicated to and educated the employees about the new systems and align the change with their culture of work (Kuslina & Widjaja, 2018). Therefore, this example demonstrates Chong et al’s (2018) irony of change, which states that one rarely understands or appreciates a situation until it changes.

Basically, the organization’s leadership implemented an unplanned change without aligning it with the organization’s culture, leading to resistance, employee resignation and poor results. Metwally et al (2019) asserted that organizational leaders can effectively implement change and avoid change resistance by acting as role models during the change process. As role models, leaders motivate and energize employees while communicating honestly about the intended change. However, according to Metwally et al (2019), it is imperative that the leaders do not forget about organizational culture.

Conclusion

To conclude, organizational leadership, culture and change are three important issues that have both theoretical and practical implications on management. It is therefore imperative for managers to understand these three concepts and how they corelate to influence organization behaviour and decision-making. Because organizational change creates some level of uncertainty among employees, most firms face change resistance. But leaders can overcome this resistance by using organizational culture and adopting the right leadership style. As they introduce change, they should strengthen the organization’s underlying cultural values so that employees can easily accept the change. This validates the statement that: leading through change can happen effectively only if a full understanding and appreciation of organizational culture is progressively developed.

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