An organisation’s culture has a significant impact on its performance because of its effects on employee attitudes, efficiency and motivation. Consequently, managers have struggled to strike the right balance between addressing employee concerns and tweaking aspects of the overall corporate culture to yield improved performance (Kalkan et al., 2020; Garg, Dar and Mishra, 2018). Leadership has been touted as one of the tools for achieving this goal (Snaebjornsson et al., 2015). This paper is a research proposal to determine the extent that leadership shapes organisational culture to improve productivity.
Importance of Topic and Justification for Review
The proposed study is worthy of a literature review because organisational culture plays an important role in aligning employee purpose with an organisation’s overall mission and values. Stated differently, organisational culture creates synchrony in the attainment of individual and corporate goals (Staadt, 2015). This alignment of purpose enables members to perform their tasks well by minimizing conflicts with management. Therefore, the proposed research would be useful in improving the relationship between workers and their employers as well as boost productivity.
There are sufficient academic materials, such as books, peer-reviewed journals, organisational reports, government publications and credible online sources, to investigate the research issue. Most of these articles independently explain the role of leadership in organizing human resource capabilities and the importance of organizational culture in improving employee productivity and, by extension, that of an organization (Khan et al., 2020; Saleem, Shenbei and Hanif, 2020). In the proposed study, these two centres of information will be linked to understanding the extent that organizations can use leadership as a tool to reshape their cultures for better performance.
Plan of Work
The literature review will include an analysis of between 30 and 40 empirical academic materials that focus on leadership and organizational culture. The documents will mostly be peer-reviewed journals and books published within the last five years. They will be obtained from reputable academic databases, such as Google Scholar, Jstor and Sage Publications. Key terms and phrases to be used include “leadership” “organisational culture” and “performance.” Supporting materials will be drawn from credible websites and organisational or corporate reports. These sources of research data will be analysed in a narrative review format where the emphasis will be on appraising the published articles to the extent that they address the research topic, as recommended by Creswell (2015).
The first step in conducting the literature review process will be to evaluate the theoretical framework of the study and contextualise the overlapping aspects of leadership and culture in the analytical framework. The second step will involve the use of the mixed methods approach, as the appropriate research design, for collecting data. The technique involves using aspects of quantitative and qualitative reasoning to review research data (Bryman and Bell, 2015; Sherbaum and Shockley, 2015). This stage of the research will be based on the thematic and coding method, which will help the researcher to categorise data according to relevant themes. A code will later be assigned to them to complete iterative review processes.
Purpose of Review
The findings of the proposed review will be relevant to practitioners, policymakers, management education experts and academicians who are interested in expanding their knowledge regarding leadership and organisational culture (Easterby-Smith, 2015). Indeed, by understanding the extent that leadership plays in shaping organisational culture to improve performance, companies would be better prepared to manage some of the human resource challenges affecting their performance.
Reference List
Bryman, A. and Bell, E. (2015) Business research methods. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Creswell, J. W. (2015) A concise introduction to mixed-method research. London: Sage.
Easterby-Smith (2015) Management and business research. London: Sage.
Garg, K., Dar, I. A. and Mishra, M. (2018) ‘Job satisfaction and work engagement: a study using private sector bank managers’, Advances in Developing Human Resources, 20(1), pp. 58-71.
Kalkan, Ü. et al. (2020) ‘The relationship between school administrators’ leadership styles, school culture, and organizational image’, SAGE Open, 4(1), pp. 1-10.
Khan, M. A. et al. (2020) ‘The interplay of leadership styles, innovative work behavior, organizational culture, and organizational citizenship behavior’, SAGE Open, 7(3), pp. 151-163.
Saleem, Z., Shenbei, Z. and Hanif, A. M. (2020) ‘Workplace violence and employee engagement: the mediating role of work environment and organizational culture’, SAGE Open, 10(2), pp. 286-291.
Sherbaum, C. and Shockley, K. (2015) Analysing quantitative data for business and management students. London: Sage.
Snaebjornsson, I. M. et al. (2015) ‘Cross-cultural leadership: expectations on gendered leaders’ behavior’, SAGE Open, 9(1), pp. 67-79.
Staadt, J. (2015) ‘The cultural analysis of soft systems methodology and the configuration model of organizational culture’, SAGE Open, 5(2), pp. 221-234.