Leadership, Culture and Knowledge Management

In this paper we are going to study such important issues for organization management as organizational culture, diversity, communication, business ethics and change management, namely the brief explanations of these terms and their objectives along with example of their application.

Organizational culture is a rather versatile notion and can be studied from various perspectives, thus there is no unified definition of it. One of the most appropriate definitions seems to be the following: “Any social system arising from a network of shared ideologies consisting of two components: substance-the networks of meaning associated with ideologies, norms, and values; and forms-the practices whereby the meanings are expressed, affirmed, and communicated to members” (Baker, 2001). There are two major approaches to the culture interpretation; according to the first one culture appears as soon as people start to develop common interests and are united into one group, forming communities, nations and so on. According to the second one ”“ culture grows from social interaction process as a result of behavior. Thus organizational culture may be simply defined as a set of rules, accepted by a certain organization as an integral part of its policy and behavior directions, aiming at improvement of the processing of the organization and achievement of its aims, being mutually advantageous for management and workers of the company.

Normally diversity is one of the key points of any organization. Organizations have to focus upon numerous issues, objectives, capabilities, talents, purposes and so on. This is evident that managing diversity is much more difficult that managing and controlling nonconformity.

However in order to support and to develop creativity and innovative approaches to work, to increase individual motivation and dynamic of work it is not correct to limit freedom and create unified common vision.

Another vitally important function of management is communication ”“ the process of transmitting information, ideas, plans, opinions of organization members (Davenport, 1998). Communication is an integral part of any human relations, but the task of management is to be able to guarantee effective communication as an important precondition for successful business. Here oral as well as written communications should be considered and should be built in the way, that it will contribute to motivation of workers, increase of their productivity and developing the major rules of business ethics. Business ethics includes the ethical and moral principles in a business environment. Most of the companies create ethic codes in order to strictly define their core values.

For any organization it is important to reach its goals, to simplify this process it is necessary to use change management. Change management ”“ “is a structured approach to transitioning individuals, teams, and organizations from a current state to a desired future state” (Baker, 2001). There are usually two models of management pointed out: individual and organizational. The first one is to take care of transitioning of individuals through various processing phases aiming at strengthening of organization’s positions; the second one is applied for effective transition of groups of workers through changing circumstances and conditions. Organizational change management is closely related to communication as means for building awareness of changes and usage of senior managers as change leaders.

One of the examples of application of organizational culture and other mentioned above principles of work is famous lades’ wear brand ”“ Betty Barclay. Although this brand was for the first time created in 1940s, ten years later, thanks to brilliant management, it became popular all over the world. The collections of this company are nowadays known for their perfect taste and quality. However this is not a conservative approach to lades’ fashion, on the contrary senior management gave an incentive to young designers and due to this the company was able to develop and build a successful business in America and in Europe. This company was able to built its own organizational culture, involving the ideas of freedom for imagination along with strict observation of quality rules; the correct direction, which was chosen by senior managers brought positive results of change management methods during development of the company.

Overall, we may conclude, that organizational culture, communication, diversity and change management provide huge contribution into effective and rapid development of business under the condition of their rational and correct application.



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