Leadership is a multi-disciplinary occupation, he who decides to take on this role must possess the skills necessary to manage, guide, and empower people. Leadership therefore is a dynamic task and entails a whole bunch of considerations: the people you manage, striving towards your goals, and specially cultivating a strong organizational culture.
An organizational culture is your organization’s working philosophy, the values that hold it together, and the psychological map of the body encompassing both the behavior and expectations of the people.
In the business world (?), leaders shape the culture of an organization more than the culture shapes them. Having a strong culture is important, research has pointed that an organization driven by a strong dominant culture tends to create a more unambiguous environment for people to work in, where efforts seem to be more united and clear, rather than a diverse mix where competition of values and discord in emphasis may occur.
In recent years, research has done us a favor by constructing for us a systematic framework in studying organizational culture. The desire to understand the mechanism of culture on team workers’ behaviors and the knowledge to cultivate desirable cultures inside an organization has created for such purposes tools like the OCAI (Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument), one developed to methodically examine organizational culture.
OCAI Research proponents Quinn and Cameron have stated that there are four strongly different culture types that drive organizations, these types being explained along the interpretation of this table. The end result of the assessment tells us that the organization assessed has a fairly flat mixture of culture types, understood simply us having no dominant prevailing type. As opposed to having one dominant strong culture, which could be of the four (4): formal (hierarchy), result-oriented (market), family like (clan), and Adhocracy (dynamic), a varied or balanced mix of culture is theorized often to result in competing values and focuses, by which emphasis or principles the organization may focus may just sprout instantaneously through political thrust inside the organization.
The construct tells us that an ideal difference of 10 points among the culture types is already relevant and necessary signal for the organization to take immediate action, however a difference of less than 10 points does not necessarily mean no action is required, says Cameron.
Further, the assessment reveals to us that hierarchy or the prevailing formal environment, in which efficiency and consistency are the driving values of the organization, is the current dominant culture of the organization, dominant in the sense of having the highest score among the 4 current types. It implies that the organization is somehow inclined to being more systematic, control driven (hierarchy, 26.67) and is concerned with long-term stability. At the other end of the result, a family-like environment or culture (clan, 23.33) in which leaders are seen as mentors and facilitators rather than coordinators, is what the organization is most likely not.
OCAI, being a tool to understand organizational culture, also gives leaders an opportunity to visualize a preferred behavioral environment. As revealed (adhocracy, 25.83), the organization desires to become more of the adhocracy type, where the environment is more on the birth of creativity, the drive for innovation, risks and the delight in producing creative solutions. At this point, the leaders are now able to visualize the current and preferred culture of their organization, now to bridge the gap between what is now and where they desire to be will become the object of their future actions, the basis of a systematic change plan.
Leadership is becoming more strategic and systematic with the help of these tools. The OCAI assessment not only gives the leaders clear picture of the inner workings of their organization, both the behavioral and psychological, it also gives us the advantage to predict which measures of change would likely turn out to be effective. These in mind, leadership strategies as we know would likely continue to evolve, becoming more predictive of the organization’s outcome, more aware of direct relationships inside and outside, and more systematic in its approach towards goal planning and execution.
Sources:
http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/organizational-culture.html
www.ocai-online.com (report on public administration May 31, 2010)
Hillis, Laurie Ma, “Culture follow the leader “
