Healthcare Ethics: Code of Ethics for Nurses with Interpretive Statements

Q1. Does culture exert a stronger influence on a leader’s power, influence, or authority? Support your view with at least one peer review article from 2012-current.

Organizational cultures have been defined in a variety of ways. According to Chapman, Reeves, and Chapin (2018), one typology is defining the culture according to dimensions of “Innovative, Dominant, Pace, Friendly, Prestigious, Trendy, Corporate Social Responsibility, Traditional, and Diverse” (p. 1). Although all leaders bring their personality to the organizational table, it is worth noting that human beings are social animals, and no individual operates in a vacuum. Some leaders may be more enthusiastic about their organization’s culture than others; additionally, some organizational cultures may be more subject to change and shaping from a strong leader. Still, because leadership is ultimately a dialogue between the leader and organizational subordinates, the organization’s history, and the environmental pressures shaping that culture, I would argue that it is impossible for a leader to entirely change the organization’s culture, at least in the short term. Even organizations heavily influenced by their original founders like Apple and Google have had to change as their original founders passed away, or simply because of changing regulations and customer attitudes. Diffuse organizations, or organizations highly dependent upon allowing subordinates to exercise creative control, may also mean that authoritarian leaders cannot fully exercise their authority within certain types of contexts.

Q2. Response

The idea of situational leadership, or the notion that leaders must adapt their styles to the specific needs of the organization, implies that leaders must be very adaptable with their styles. As you note, the situational theory suggests a collaborative style of leadership is better suited to a workplace where workers are eager to learn and a task is open-ended. Authoritarian approaches may be more beneficial if workers have a low skill level and motivation, and a task must be performed quickly. But in answer to the question of whether culture or personality is most important, it is worth noting that the culture of the organization itself must allow for this type of flexibility and adaptiveness. Some workplaces only permit a very authoritarian approach because of the belief that this is the only way to get things done. Similarly, some workplaces where leaders have very little formal authority may make a collaborative approach necessary, regardless of the task or leader’s preference. In other words, while leaders may have a specific preference, they must have the right culture and leadership to support their choices. Particularly in large organizations such as Theranos, Inc., leaders rarely have the ability to exercise enough authority to entirely change the wider organizational culture.

Q3. Response

The typology of power, role, task, and person is an interesting way to divide leadership approaches. It is interesting that different leaders may flourish in different cultural environments. For example, leaders who flourish in a person-driven culture that focuses on service-based needs, and take an interest in others, may not flourish in task-driven organizations which focus on achieving goals in a highly functional fashion. The structure of the organization can clearly either serve or not serve the organization’s larger purpose as well, as matrix organizations may be suited to more task-based cultures (such as the task of crafting a new form of technology or creative advertising campaign within a particular organizational division), while more role-based organization with a functional approach and more centralized leadership may suit an organization with more standardized aims, such as producing a narrow range of similar, high-quality products. Just as organizations are diverse in their aims, the leaders which serve such organizations should be equally diverse in the approaches they use, based upon their awareness of the purpose they must serve as leaders, not simply their personal comfort zone.

Reference

Chapman, D. S., Reeves, P., & Chapin, M. (2018). A lexical approach to identifying dimensions of organizational culture. Frontiers in Psychology, 9(876), 1012. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5996186/pdf/fpsyg-09-00876.pdf