How organizational culture and leadership style affect employees’

performance of genders Bassem E. Maamari

Department of Management Studies, Lebanese American University, Beirut, Lebanon, and

Adel Saheb Adnan Kassar School of Business, Lebanese American University,

Beirut, Lebanon

Abstract Purpose – This paper aims to highlight the importance of organizational culture on the leader’s style and the effect of the chosen leadership style on the team’s performance. It surveys a strata of leaders from the Middle East in the current turbulent environment.

Design/methodology/approach – A research paper based on a quantitative data collection in the service sector from a large number of stratified sampled firms and respondents. Findings – The cross-sectional data from 40 service companies reveal some interesting results highlighting the interrelationships between these three variables. The findings suggest that managers need to build on this concept finding in providing further training and development of employees’ skills in addition to an organizational culture of acceptance, adaptation and diversity. Research limitations/implications – Electing to use a specific set of criteria in sampling might have resulted in eliminating a meaningful different direction in the results. Moreover, the size of the survey tool limited the number of variables to test with the study. Practical implications – A number of implications are worthy of mention. First, devising reward programmes that are fairly attractive to both genders independently of each other should be a managerial priority, along with the creation and development of strong organizational cultures. Social implications – Finally, a coupled performance and organizational culture of efficiency at the workplace, if not paralleled with a proper leadership style that fosters positive results, will only result in partial improvements in the big organizational picture, resulting in the persistence of the old prejudice and discrimination along the gender and age lines. Originality/value – The study examines a suggested model in a new environment that is known to be deeply rooted in old-fashioned paternalistic managerial behaviour, and where change, if occurring, is extremely slow to introduce.

Keywords Performance, Leadership style, Organizational culture, Gender

Paper type Research paper

1. Introduction The contemporary integration of female workers into the Lebanese workplace has pulled the attention of the organizations towards the need of amendment to embrace this evolution. Due to the importance of employees’ fit to their commitment towards the organization (Behery and Paton, 2008), organizational culture is established from the inception phase in the life of any organization. It develops over time to reach a level of pervasiveness and deployment, making it one of the most challenging factors to change at a later point. With

IJOA 26,4

630

Received 10April 2017 Revised 11 September 2017 20 October 2017 Accepted 22 October 2017

International Journal of Organizational Analysis Vol. 26 No. 4, 2018 pp. 630-651 © EmeraldPublishingLimited 1934-8835 DOI 10.1108/IJOA-04-2017-1151

The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at: www.emeraldinsight.com/1934-8835.htm

the advent multi-fold increased influx of women in the twentieth century to the workforce (Igbaria and Baroudi, 1995), the importance of the culture lies in its setting the framework for a number of variables in the organization, including performance standards, attitudes (efficiency and/or effectiveness) and norms of behaviour. These in turn limit the contribution of the lower level leaders and managers that attempt to apply randomly different styles of leadership, whether transactional or transformational, to this setting where the norms are already pre-set. Therefore, this study is seeking to investigate the existence of statistically significant effect of organizational culture on performance of both genders and whether leadership style can or doesmediate this relationship.

The organizational culture presents by itself as both an organizational strength as well as a barrier to development. Its effect may vary between improving efficiency and performance and hindering the workflow processes. Whereas leadership sets the rules of the game of how employees relate to each other and to managers, its outcomes provide value to the firm in terms of commitment, loyalty and dedication of the team members towards their colleagues, respective teams and their leaders. In this organizational setting, in a context where research concerning consequence and significance of the organizational culture and leadership style on performance is extremely limited in Lebanon, testing the proposed model earns a higher interest in themanagerial circles.

This manuscript is organized into four sections, namely, a review of the available scholarly literature, followed by the methods used in the study, then the results and their analysis to draw somemanagerial implications and conclusions.

2. Literature review Dwelling into the managerial world, and seeing the importance that operational teams dedicate to performance and the ensuing outcomes, clears the picture for researchers. The compression of operating costs in a globalized business environment where the firm seeks to satisfy an ever-changing demand within a highly competitive market, forces the today’s organizations to overlook certain factors. Among these are the effects of organizational culture and leadership style on performance. The following presents a glance at the scholarly literature on the topics at hand, beginning by organizational culture, followed by leadership style then performance and the relationship between these factors.

2.1 Organizational culture Organizational culture or corporate culture is the set of values, beliefs and way of doing things in an organization. It defines the ambiance in which an employee is working and how he/she should behave to achieve his/her duties (Mgbere, 2009), and his/her awareness of what is occurring in the organizational environment (Hofstede, 2011). It has also an impact on decision-making, level of authority and agency theory in organizations (Childe et al., 2016). Therefore, this aspect of the organization has become widely important and interesting to measure its abilities to innovate and adapt to the change of the cultures and how it affects its performance (Mgbere, 2009). The national and societal culture of the country affects organizational culture (Hofstede, 2011). According to Hofstede’s and Trompeneaars’ Model, there are measurable dimensions for the society’s culture that can influence and shape individuals’ values and norms who are the founders, employees and customers of the organizations. Values represent the corner stone and the supreme part of organizational culture (Hogan and Coote, 2014). But at the gender level, this performance is reported to vary largely, despite the many attempts to provide for equal opportunity. The explanation could be referred to the discriminatory prevailing attitude at the human capital level (Glass and Cook, 2016; Sidani, 2016; Salloum et al., 2016; Tlaiss and Kauser, 2011;

Employees’ performance of

genders