The Leader's Companion: Insights on Leadership Through the Ages by J. Thomas Wren

Author:J. Thomas Wren [Wren, J. Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, pdf
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2013-07-29T16:00:00+00:00

Summary and Conclusions

The concept of culture is most useful if it helps to explain some of the more seemingly incomprehensible and irrational aspects of groups and organizations. Analysts of culture have a wide variety of ways of looking at the concept. My formal definition brings many of these various concepts together, putting the emphasis on shared, taken-for-granted basic assumptions held by the members of the group or organization. In this sense, any group with a stable membership and a history of shared learning will have developed some level of culture, but a group having either a great deal of turnover of members and leaders or a history without any kind of challenging events may well lack any shared assumptions. Not every collection of people develops a culture; in fact, we tend to use the term group rather than crowd or collection of people only when there has been enough of a shared history so that some degree of culture formation has taken place.

Culture and leadership are two sides of the same coin in that leaders first create cultures when they create groups and organizations. Once cultures exist, they determine the criteria for leadership and thus determine who will or will not be a leader. But if cultures become dysfunctional, it is the unique function of leadership to perceive the functional and dysfunctional elements of the existing culture and to manage cultural evolution and change in such a way that the group can survive in a changing environment.

The bottom line for leaders is that if they do not become conscious of the cultures in which they are embedded, those cultures will manage them. Cultural understanding is desirable for all of us, but it is essential to leaders if they are to lead.

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