Understanding Organizational Culture by Alvesson Mats

Author:Alvesson, Mats [Alvesson, Mats]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446289662
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Published: 2012-11-15T23:00:00+00:00

Post-founder leadership

This history of leadership at CCC provides the background for the common features of the exercise of leadership within the company at the time of my study – 10 years after it was founded and 2–3 years after the founders had withdrawn from the operational management of the company. The patterns initiated by the founders continued to be distinct to the company. Group cohesion, friendship, ‘have fun at the workplace’, openness and generosity with information to the employees, etc. were important values.

From the view of CCC’s management an important task was to create a totality, to get the parts of the company together. What may be referred to as social integrative leadership is a matter of inducing a common orientation and direction in the operative units (the subsidiaries, project groups and individual consultants), and to contribute to the identification with the company and a feeling of loyalty, and to achieve social cohesion both at the micro level, within work groups and subsidiaries, and at the overall level, within the company as an entity. Social integrative leadership does not primarily address technical and operative issues. It is a matter of transferring ideas, meanings and orientations that counteract the disintegrative tendencies inherent in consultancy work. It facilitates convergence in thinking, feeling and acting which increases the chances of people staying in the company, getting along and being able to cooperate efficiently within and between units.

Social integrative leadership is partly a matter of boundary keeping. The key group in CCC was the subsidiary managers – heading units of 30–50 people. (When a subsidiary grew and employed more than 50 persons, it was divided up into two units.) The company prided itself on its decentralization and very flat organization. In consultancy companies, as in some other service companies, the boundaries between company and customer were often unclear. The projects were carried out on behalf of the client, in cooperation with the client’s personnel and often at the client’s workplace. This could trigger loyalty conflicts, and identity problems might follow from this:

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.