Organizational Culture and Leadership

"If a group's survival is threatened because elements of its culture have become maladapted, it is ultimately the function of leadership to recognize and do something about the situation."

"All group learning ultimately reflects someone's original values, someone's sense of what ought to be as distinct from what is."

"Every new group or organization must develop a shared concept of its ultimate survival problem, from which it usually derives its most basic sense of core mission, primary tasks, or reason to be."

"Consensus on the core mission does not automatically guarantee that the members of the group will have common goals."

"If a group is to accomplish tasks that enable it to adapt to its external environment, it must be able to develop and maintain a set of internal relationships among its members."

"To function as a group, the individuals who come together must establish a system of communication and a language that permits interpretation of what is going on."

"Initially, the criteria for inclusion are usually set by the leader, founder, or convener, but as the group members interact, those criteria are tested and a group consensus arises around the criteria that survive the test."

"Human societies develop pecking orders just as chickens do, but both the process and the outcome are, of course, far more complex."

"Every new group must decide simultaneously how to deal with authority problems and how to establish workable peer relationships."

"To function, every group must develop a system of sanctions for obeying or disobeying the rules."

"Organizations are capable of developing the equivalent of religion and/or ideology on the basis of the manner in which critical events were managed."

"What is the appropriate psychological contract between employers and employees? Is authority ultimately based on traditional lineal authority, oral consensus, law, or charisma?"

"From the point of view of this analysis, one needs to determine not which position along any of these dimensions is the correct one but whether or not there is consensus on the underlying assumptions that the members of a group hold."

"When people differ in their experience of time, tremendous communication and relationship problems typically emerge."

"Are an individual's actions ultimately related to individual self-interest or to a larger collective unit?"

"One of the most powerful mechanisms that founders, leaders, managers, or even colleagues have available for communicating what they believe in or care about is what they systematically pay attention to."

"A cultural mismatch in an acquisition or merger is as great a risk as a financial, product, or market mismatch."

"All human systems attempt to maintain equilibrium and to maximize their autonomy vis-a-vis their environment."

"Proposals to deliberately change the culture from either inside or outside are likely to be totally ignored or resisted."

"When senior management or the founder confronts the criteria for a successor, cultural issues are forced into the open."

"Organization development can best be defined as a planned change process, managed from the top, taking into account both the technical and human sides of the organization."

"Technological seduction involves the deliberate, managed introduction of specific technologies for the sake of seducing organization members into new behavior."

"If an organization has had a long history of success with certain assumptions about itself and the environment, it is unlikely to want to challenge or reexamine those assumptions."

"Culture change is sometimes stimulated by systematically bringing outsiders into jobs below the top-management level and allowing them gradually to educate and reshape top management's thinking."

"The most intriguing leadership role in culture management is one in which the leader attempts to develop a learning organization that will be able to make its own perpetual diagnosis."

" When culture becomes dysfunctional, leadership is needed to help the group unlearn some of its cultural assumptions and learn new assumptions."