Organizational Culture and Leadership by Edgar H. Scein

Organizational Culture and Leadership

Preface to Fourth Edition 

Organizational culture

Organizational culture and leadership have both become very complicated  topics. Over the past several decades, organizational culture has drawn themes from anthropology, sociology, social psychology, and cognitive psychology. It has become a fi eld of its own and has connected signifi cantly with the broader cultural studies that have been spawned by the rampant globalism of recent times. The explosion of new tools in information technology and media transmission has made cultural phenomena highly accessible, and some of these phenomena are unique to the information age. 

Cultural variations

Cultural variations around nation, ethnicity, religion, and social class have become highly visible through television and the Internet. Having a certain kind of culture, being a certain kind of culture, and wanting a certain kind of culture have been frequently referred to in the daily press. “ Command and control ” has become a cultural archetype even as clear descriptions of just what this means have become more elusive when we observe organizations carefully.

We are also increasingly in an age of peril, especially from the potential dangers of rapidly increasing complexity in all of our technologies. And surprisingly, this also begins to focus us on culture. We are in danger of destroying our planet through indifference to the threat of global warming; we have the capacity to genetically engineer various forms of life with unknown consequences; we have a major problem in our health care industry because of high rates of hospital - induced infections, raising the specter of possible bio threats; and we continue to depend on nuclear energy even as we dread nuclear weapons and fear nuclear accidents.

Suddenly we have become aware that the occupations that govern activities in these arenas are themselves cultures about which we know precious little. We know, for example, that doctors strongly value autonomy and that this makes certain kinds of reforms in health care more difficult.

Executive culture

We know that the “ executive culture ” values returns for the stockholders, which creates problems of social responsibility. We know that the culture of science values exploration and innovation even into ethically dangerous areas such as genetically engineering or cloning humans. Not surprisingly, the peril of further nuclear accidents has created in the nuclear industry a whole new set of concerns about the safety of this technology leading to a preoccupation with and effort to defi ne “ safety culture. ”

Copyright © 2010 

by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Published by 

Jossey-Bass

A Wiley Imprint

989 Market Street, San Francisco, CA 94103-1741—www.josseybass.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for

ISBN 978-0-470-18586-5

Printed in the United States of America fourth edition

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