Diversity (business) - Role of Leadership

Role of Leadership

The culture of an organization is reflective of the leadership. Exploring organizations that have experienced dramatic culture shifts, such as NASA from the height and success of the Apollo era to the demise of the Challenger and Columbia days, it is evident that the culture was in large part affected by the top leaders. A study of successful multicultural organizations as opposed to monolithic and plural organizations can be understood by applying theories of leadership which have evolved over time. Trait leadership theory suggests that leadership is dependent on physical and social attributes of the individual and greatly based on European cultures. Theories that deal with power and authority will include the autocratic, democratic and laissez-faire leadership styles which reference the management and subordinate relationship to distributing and sharing power. These can overlap and lend themselves to situational leadership which Paul Hersey and Kenneth Blanchard suggested depends the combination of the relationship behavior and the tasks at hand. The last types of leadership which underscore those of the multicultural organizations are transformational and discursive leadership. Transformational leadership focuses on change agents and those with a competency to see the vision for the future and communicate it to others. Discursive leadership takes a closer examination of a leaders ability to shape the organizational talk, meaning and resulting interpretations from all discursive acts, symbols and vocabulary. The combination of these last two leadership styles creates a culture that allows and encourages mid-level managers to use diversity as an influential resource in order to enhance organizational effectiveness. In the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, C.L. Walck defines managing diversity in the workplace as "Negotiating interaction across culturally diverse groups, and contriving to get along in an environment characterized by cultural diversity".