It's very important for a business’s performance that the CEO has a leadership style that is somehow different from the organizational culture, according to a study published in The Journal of Applied Psychology.
However, a CEO shouldn’t be oppositional or confrontational. When every practice that has worked is now challenged, it will cause resistance and resentment, warns the businessnewsdaily.com website.
If leaders run the company in a manner that is different from its culture, they provide something that the current company culture can't.
The authors defined organizational culture as values and norms that are shared within an organization. These values and norms drive employee behavior. We can say that there are two basic types of organizational cultures:
- Task-oriented
- Relationship-oriented
A task-oriented culture is a culture that focuses on problems such as anticipating and monitoring customer needs and what competitors are doing.
Contrary to that, companies with relationship-oriented cultures want their employees to be internally focused within the company. The emphasis is on topics such as coordination and communication.
When leadership and culture are too similar, only things that have worked in the past will be considered. People won't try to acquire new, different resources or give a new processes a try.
Real example: Delta Air Lines CEO
Former Delta CEO Richard Anderson had a style very different from the company culture. He was focused on tasks – and that complemented the airline's relationship-focused company culture well.
Thanks to that, they were able to seize new opportunities. The relationship-focused culture enabled employees to cooperate well and execute their tasks.
A CEO's leadership style should be based on the positive aspects of the existing company culture, while making its weak points stronger.
-jk-