Leadership and Organizational Culture

Leadership and Organizational Culture
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Abstract
Leadership is crucial to the effective running and operations of any business or organization. For any organization to run optimally, it must have a properly vetted, qualified, and well-able leadership structure and organizational culture. There can be no room for confusion of a deficiency of clarity at the professional workplace as these two things can cripple the organization. Societally, with a lack of leadership, people tend to do what feels right to them; what they deem is best or right. This subjective approach towards human interpersonal relationships is backward and insufficient to handle the complexities involved in everyday life because what is best or right for one person might be the worst thing to do according to another individual. A set structured system of authority and leadership that is fair and unquestionable is thus a necessity for any society, and the same goes for any organization. Without well-laid leadership roles and offices occupied by the rightful individuals, an organization should never hope to be competitive in their field of business or engagement. This essay will delve deeper into leadership, the organizational structure, and its role in optimizing an organization’s operations.
           Keywords: Leadership, organization, culture, structure, optimization.
 
Leadership and Organizational Culture
Introduction
           The topics of leadership and the role of organizational culture are of vital interest to me because it relates to my unit of study now. The lessons learned and picked up in the course of this research study will prove to be of great importance someday in the future at the professional workplace. A good understanding and appreciation of an organization’s culture can help ease a new employee’s transition into the company as he or she will know what is required for them; when in Rome, do as the Romans do. A clear understanding of the significance and importance of leadership in an organization will inculcate and cultivate further respect for authority, and provide me with a better appreciation of the organization’s vision. This greater appreciation for that vision will make it easier to work towards it for myself because I will share in bearing it as one of the organization’s employees. Employees who do not believe or bear the leaders’ burden of the company’s vision, mission, and objectives cannot give their best efforts towards making that vision a reality. In contrast, employees and staff who believe in the leaders’ vision, understand it entirely is already more equipped to handle whatever comes their way and remain objective, working towards making the company’s visions, beliefs and objectives a reality. They put their best foot forward in doing whatever is required of them. They are ready to take the initiative to expedite their fellow workers and the company at large. This crop of workers and employees become the fuel that propels and skyrockets the organization to higher and previously unknown heights – sometimes even exceeding the organization’s biggest hopes and dreams. Thus, the topic of leadership and organizational culture is massively important to me.
           I hope that one day I will have the honor and privilege to be the vision-bearer of my own company. As such, I need to learn as much information about leadership and the organizational culture as possible. This information will help make me a better leader and also enable me to understand and appreciate the needs of those I shall be leading. It will allow me to craft and implement rules and regulations that will be geared towards serving their needs as people with a greater view of benefitting the company as a good and happy workforce will translate in the increased profitability and growth of the company. Practically, the topic is not only useful but necessary for running organizations. For instance, in the corporate world, in a study done to demonstrate the importance of leadership and organizational culture in knowledge management, it was found that administration influences about 12.8%. In comparison, an institution’s corporate culture has an influence of 26.7% on the management of an institution’s knowledge database (Agustriyana et al., 2019).
Over the years, the topics of organizational culture and leadership have become increasingly thematically varied, drawing motifs and subjects from as wide as even cognitive psychology. There are many ways to approach the issue of organizational culture. It is safe to say that in every type of organization, there is a type of culture that is specific to that organization. Thus, organizational cultures are as many as the types of organizations out there. Whether in the field of medicine, for instance, there is a certain work culture that best befits running a hospital or medical institution and is specific for that application. For example, because doctors and generally, most medical personnel prefer independence and autonomy from other external governing authorities, they cannot be governed as any other average organization. They employ a specialized type of organizational interaction, discipline, and way of doing things specific to them – only engaging external authorities for legal issues such as new drug certifications.
           Ethical issues can quickly arise in the field of science with a culture that actively promotes discovery, exploration, and innovation. Using scientific techniques and principles in the nuclear transfer of somatic cells, scientists were able to clone a sheep in 1996 that lived till 2003 when it was euthanized due to a progressive lung disease it had developed (Greely, 2020). Following the groundbreaking breakthrough in 1996, the scientific community all across the world was in an uproar with debates of trials in human cloning technology. Some scientists and researchers argued that it was highly unethical and uncouth, while others felt the exact antonymic way. With difficult ethical issues and questions such as these, traditional work culture is insufficient to dictate the way forward. Despite scientific challenges encountered in attempts to clone humans, governments the world over had to ban or declare that they had already imposed bans on human cloning procedures and trials. It took government intervention to stop the increasingly heightened tension between the whole world and the scientific community.
In the world of nuclear physics, capable countries and governments worldwide are highly apprehensive of embracing the technology due to the massively devastating effects of nuclear accidents and plant explosions in times past, such as the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 or the more recent Fukushima Daiichi catastrophe in 2011 in Japan. Few and far between though they are, these disasters can have ramifications on countries and their peoples for ages; up to thousands of years. It is, therefore, understandable that governments are less than ready or willing to embrace nuclear technology before a culture of safety has been adequately established, vetted, tested, and learned by the more-than-qualified staff chosen to work in nuclear plants. The proper implementation of this ‘safety culture’ in line with world standards is what stands in the way between governments and the massively significant energy cost reductions that would come with adopting nuclear plant technology.
The Distinction between Organizational Culture and Leadership
According to Schein (2010), an organization’s culture, especially for well-established organizations and firms such as law, engineering, and medicine, can be considered macrocultures while the organizational subc...