مطالعه طولی اثرات رهبری کاریزماتیک و فرهنگ سازمانی بر عملکرد عینی و ادراکی شرکت

We investigated the combined effects of charismatic leadership and organizational culture on perceived and objective company performance using a longitudinal design. Employees (N = 1214) in 46 branches of a large Dutch bank rated branch management on charismatic leadership, organizational culture in terms of work practices, as well as perceived organizational performance. Objective performance data were collected twice, two years apart. The split sample technique attenuated common source bias. Results of structural equation modeling, in which Time 1 financial performance measures were controlled, revealed that charisma increased financial performance; however culture did not do so. Culture and charisma were significantly related to perceived performance, and culture and charisma were interrelated. A longer time interval may be necessary before the effects of culture on financial performance become apparent. The findings are discussed against the backdrop of the value of intangible resources.

Two types of intangible resources that are regularly noted in the scholarly management literature to explain sustainable firm success are leadership and culture (Schein, 1985). This study explores the questions, do charismatic leadership and organizational culture each add value to a firm's performance, and what is the link between leadership and culture? Leadership has been defined as “the ability of an individual to influence, motivate, and enable others to contribute toward the effectiveness and success of an organization of which they are members” (House, Javidan, Hanges, & Dorfman, 2002, p. 5), and it is thought that organizational culture affects performance through a complex interplay of leadership style, business strategy, and organizational structure and process (Hult, Cavusgil, Delingonul, Kiyak, & Lagerström, 2007). Much of the organizational culture literature blurs the distinction between leadership and culture and leadership content is often included in the operational definitions of culture (Ashkanasy, Broadfoot, & Falkus, 2000; Marcoulides & Heck, 1993). In practice, whereas charismatic leaders can induce change through appealing visions, organizational cultures can, for example, act as barriers against change. These insights make clear that leadership and culture are two sides of the same coin. Decades worth of leadership studies have examined the relationship between leadership styles of top management teams and organizational performance. Meta-analyses have shown that leadership is significantly related to desirable organizational outcomes (Judge and Piccolo, 2004, Lowe et al., 1996, ⁎Waldman et al., 2004 and Wang et al., 2011). There has also been some, albeit limited, empirical support for the effects of culture on organizational performance (Hartnell et al., 2011, Sackmann, 2011 and Wilderom et al., 2000). A recent meta-analysis of the relationship between human resources and firm performance recommended that “one set of processes that might be particularly important to study…is the use of high-performance work practices and systems within organizations…” (Crook, Todd, Combs, Woehr, & Ketchen, 2011, p. 451). A further shortcoming in both the leadership and culture literatures concerns the predominant use of subjective, instead of objective organizational performance measures. This study seeks to integrate the separate lines of research on leadership and culture, and to disentangle the interplay between the two and their effects on organization performance. Objective and subjective measures were used to measure performance and perceptions of organizational work practices were used to measure culture. A longitudinal design was employed so that the causal effects of leadership and culture on objective performance could be investigated. 1.1. Charismatic leadership and organizational performance The meta-analysis by Lowe et al. (1996) has shown that, of the various leader dimensions, charisma has the strongest relationship with leader effectiveness. Charismatic leaders influence employees because they are perceived as strong, effective leaders with appealing visions (Paulsen, Maldonado, Callan, & Ayoko, 2009). According to House's (1977) self-concept theory of charismatic leadership, charismatic leaders articulate a vision that relates followers' self-concepts to their roles within the organization, and followers internalize the values associated with the vision. Charismatic leaders further enhance collective employee efficacy by expressing confidence that followers can accomplish their collective objectives. Fluid speaking styles, symbolic behavior, and storytelling about bold decisions, are important behaviors exhibited by charismatic leaders (Galvin et al., 2010 and Pentland, 2010). Although there has been ample evidence in the leadership literature of a link between leader charisma and perceived organizational performance, there has been much less evidence of a link with objective performance measures ( ⁎Agle et al., 2006, Elenkov, 2002 and Lowe et al., 1996). Lowe et al. (1996) initially reported a meta-analytic mean corrected correlation of r = .35 between transformational leadership and perceived measures of performance. Subsequently, the meta-analysis by Judge and Piccolo (2004) showed that the estimated true score of the link between perceived performance and transformational leadership, of which charisma is a key factor, was ρ = .26. The relationship between charisma and objective measures of performance has been less clear. A review of the literature uncovered 11 empirical, published studies that used objective measures of performance—measures such as percentage of goals achieved and profit margin (see Appendix 1). Of these 11 studies, which included 14 operationalizations of objective performance, two studies provided clear evidence of a relationship, seven studies provided tentative evidence, and two studies failed to find a relationship altogether. Only studies 1 and 3 provided unambiguous evidence of a link between charismatic leadership and performance. Both studies used the MLQ to measure charismatic leadership, and their objective performance measures were used internally by the organizations to assess success. Study 1 (Howell & Avolio, 1993) reported that charismatic leadership predicted the percentage of goals that were met within the unit, as measured one year later. Study 3 (Geyer & Steyrer, 1998) reported that a measure of transformational leadership, which also included several charisma items, was positively related to objective long-term performance in 20 banks such as the volume of savings and loans; and to objective short-term performance such as the annual number of insurance products and subsidized housing loans. A further seven studies provided only tentative evidence of a relationship between charismatic leadership and performance (see studies 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, and 11). Barling, Weber, and Kelloway (1996) used pre- and post-test performance measures of personal loan offerings and credit card sales and found that leaders who received charismatic leadership training performed better than the control group, however the training and control groups consisted of only nine and eleven managers, respectively. Three studies showed that managerial charisma was related to controllable costs, however only in small firms (Koene, Vogelaar, & Soeters, 2002); to stock price returns, but only when business conditions were uncertain (Tosi, Misangyi, Fanelli, Waldman, & Yammarino, 2004); and to profit margins and return on investment, but not sales growth (Waldman et al., 2004). Finally, of the nine charisma scales used in the study by Rowold and Laukamp (2009), only the unconventional behavior scale was related to profit. The majority of studies cited above were not longitudinal and failed to control for prior objective organizational performance. This is crucial because employees who knew of their organization's objective performance may have attributed more or less desirable behaviors to their leaders than was actually warranted (Rosenzweig, 2007). Similarly, Meindl, and Ehrlich (1987) have described a “romance of leadership” effect and have shown that leaders received more credit for favorable organizational outcomes than did other factors. Only studies 4 and 9 controlled for perceptions of prior objective performance. However their results were tentative and conditional. Waldman, Ramírez, House and Puranam (2001) found that charismatic leadership predicted profit margin only when market conditions were uncertain, and Agle, Nagarajan, Sonnenfeld, and Srinivasan (2006) reported that charisma was related to objective measures of past performance such as stock price, return on assets, and sales growth, but not to subsequent objective performance. All in all, actual empirical support for the effect of charismatic leadership on objective performance has been meager. Therefore, an important purpose of our study was to investigate this effect with a more robust research design that made causal inferences possible. Based on the foregoing, we formulated the following hypothesis: Hypothesis 1. The charismatic leadership style of top management: a) affects objective organizational performance, and b) is positively related to perceived organizational performance. 1.2. Organizational culture, charismatic leadership, and performance Recently, Sackmann (2011) reviewed 55 organization culture studies and reported that some studies showed direct effects of culture on performance. Direct effects have been reported by Carmeli and Tishler (2004) and by Xenikou and Simosi (2006), however the latter reported an effect on only two of four cultural traits (achievement and adaptive orientation). Direct links with organizational performance have also been reported when cultures were competitive and innovative (Ogbonna & Harris, 2000) and when customer-oriented cultures were combined with time-based manufacturing practices (Nahm, Vonderembse, & Koufteros, 2004). However, the effects of culture on objective performance in these studies was difficult to assess because the construct had been either operationalized differently or reported in an imprecise or non-comprehensive manner. A critical examination of the effects of culture on performance has shown that findings have been tenuous at best. Wilderom et al. (2000) analyzed the relevant published empirical studies in detail and noted the following research design weaknesses: a) the sole use of either perceived or objective performance measures, b) the use of cross-sectional designs which make subsequent causal inferences impossible, c) failure to control for common method variance, and d) the use of managers only as raters of the cultures and the failure to include random samples of employees. Considering the importance of organizational culture, it is surprising that solid effects of culture on performance have been so scarce. The present study is designed to overcome the weaknesses noted above. One possible reason for the disappointing results is that most studies have operationalized organizational culture with surveys that have tapped shared values and attitudes instead of work practices. Schein (1985) distinguished between underlying beliefs and espoused values as elements of organizational culture and warned that espoused values may not accurately reflect the culture because of the effect of social desirability. Following Schein (2011), the underlying beliefs themselves may be unconscious but are expressed in learned responses to problems of survival in the external world and problems of internal integration. Therefore, work practices may be better indictors of culture. An organization's cultural practices are a separate and recognizable part of the fabric of any organizational unit and refer to patterns in “people's recurrent actions” (Feldman & Orlikowski, 2011, p. 1240) at the unit-level of analysis. Organizational practices “…reflect the shared knowledge and competence of the organization…they tend to be…viewed as the taken-for-granted-way of doing certain tasks” (Kostova, 1999, p. 309). Hofstede (2001) showed that organizations differed more pointedly on practices than on values. According to Hofstede (2001) the practice, for example, of “being on time to meetings,” more clearly discriminated organizations from one another than did the value of “importance of challenging work.” He noted that organizational culture was learned later in life and was therefore not as deeply rooted as were values and attitudes. Hofstede, Neuijen, Ohayv and Sanders (1990) argued that culture could best be measured with practices because they reflected the collective wisdom within an organization about how job duties were to be performed. Several scholars have recommended that culture be operationalized as organization practices (Calori & Sarnin, 1991; Marcoulides & Heck, 1993). Accordingly, we developed a set of five organizational work practices to “further elucidate the veracity of culture's relationship with effectiveness criteria” (Hartnell et al., 2011, p. 688). The work practices used to measure organizational culture were: empowerment, external orientation, interdepartmental cooperation, human-resource orientation, and improvement orientation. The work practices were based on a synthesis of the organizational culture literature by Van Den Berg and Wilderom (2004). Empowerment is the degree to which employees have decision latitude in their jobs. Charismatic leaders with a vision tend to encourage employees to take greater personal responsibility towards achieving that vision (Bass & Avolio, 1993). Logan and Ganster (2007) showed that performance improved for those business units of a large trucking company that received empowerment interventions. Accordingly, Tsai (2006, p. 1512) found that in Taiwan “the effective use of employee empowerment practices is positively related to organizational performance.” Spreitzer, Kizilos, and Nason (1997) found that several dimensions of psychological empowerment were related to effectiveness while the meta-analytic review of Seibert, Wang, and Courtright (2011) also lent support for bringing empowerment into a practice measure of organizational culture. External orientation focuses on how firms operate in an external environment with customers, markets, and competitors. Open-systems theory and many other writings about culture have made it clear that an organization's external orientation is reflected in its internal functioning (Alpkan et al., 2007 and Ellinger et al., 2008). Menguc, Auh, and Shih (2007) have shown that charismatic leaders, through their influence on the market orientation of employees, affected a firm's external orientation. A meta-analysis of 56 empirical studies showed clearly that market orientation, which is a segment of external orientation, is a determinant of performance (Ellis, 2006). Along these lines, a study in a Chinese context showed that a culture with a strong market orientation had an indirect positive effect on new product performance (Wei & Morgan, 2004). More recently, Yarbrough, Morgan, and Vorhies (2011) found support for the firm-performance importance of its external-orientation practices. Interdepartmental cooperation, also known as interdepartmental integration, is the third work practice. It was selected because horizontal differentiation is a well-known barrier to productive intergroup communication. Charismatic leaders in senior management emphasize the common, integrative purposes of the organization, and therefore stimulate cooperation between and among the organization's units. Recent positive performance effects of interdepartmental integration have been reported by Ellinger, Daughtery, and Keller (2000), Kahn, 2001 and Kahn, 2005, and Lascu, Manrai, Manrai, and Kleczek (2006). Many authors have considered human resource content, the fourth factor, to be a part of an organization's culture because human resource policies affect every employee (Coff & Kryscynski, 2011; Marcoulides & Heck, 1993). Annual employee performance appraisals are a typical example. Bass and Avolio (1993) found that transformational leaders took responsibility for developing their followers. Additional studies have shown that those organizations with quality-focused human resource orientations that included training, participation in results-oriented appraisals, and career advancement through internal ladders, had better financial and product/service performance (Akdere, 2009, Akhtar et al., 2008 and Sels et al., 2006). Although human resource programs come with extra costs, those costs are often offset by productivity gains (Subramony, 2009). Finally, the degree of improvement orientation among personnel reflects an organization's inclination toward change. Charismatic leaders, through their visions, often foster a culture of proactive, creative change and growth (Bass & Avolio, 1993). A positive relationship between different continuous improvement interventions and performance has been reported in several studies (Corso and Giacobbe, 2007, Hyland et al., 2007 and Middel et al., 2007). For example, Total Quality Management has been known to lower production costs and improve performance (Kenichiro, 2002). In addition to discussing the effects of leadership and culture on organizational performance, it is also important to consider the interplay between leadership and culture. Leadership and culture are related constructs in that they both describe social interactions within organizations, however their effects emanate clearly from different levels-of-analyses (Yammarino, Dionne, Chun, & Dansereau, 2005). Whereas leadership denotes the behavior of one or more individuals who act in a formal or informal role, culture is a byproduct of group processes. Clearly, leaders do influence a company's culture. For example, company founders often imprint organizations with their own personalities and behavioral patterns (Ford, Wilderom, & Caparella, 2008). And charismatic leaders tend to change the culture by first understanding how the culture developed and then providing a vision with new shared assumptions, values, norms, and practices. Conversely, culture may influence leadership behaviors. Leaders who appear to best represent the existing or desired culture are often the first to be recruited from within the organization. Moreover, culture shapes managerial perceptions of events that, in turn, affect how leaders manage (Jaskyte, 2010 and Walter and Bruch, 2009). For example, managers will be more hesitant to use an authoritarian leadership style when the culture endorses employee empowerment. Based on the foregoing, we formulated the following hypothesis: Hypothesis 2. Organizational cultures with more empowerment, external orientation, interdepartmental cooperation, human-resource orientation, and improvement orientation: a) affect objective organizational performance, b) are positively related to perceived organizational performance, and c) are linked to the charismatic leadership style of top management. To summarize, we examined how leader charisma and organizational culture jointly affect firm performance, and how the two factors are related to one another. This study differs from many previous studies in that, a) both objective as well as perceived measures of organizational performance were incorporated, and b) work practices, instead of values, were used to measure perceptions of culture. A longitudinal design in which measures were taken at two points in time was employed so that causal relationships between leadership and culture, and objective performance, could be investigated. Moreover, survey responses were split into subsamples to minimize common method variance. Finally, whereas most other studies have been conducted in North America, this study was conducted in The Netherlands.

The present study is one of few that investigates the relationships among charismatic leadership, organizational culture, and firm performance. The most important finding is that charismatic leadership affects objective company performance. Additionally, charismatic leadership and culture are related to perceived firm performance. Finally, the results show that charismatic leadership is related to the organizational practices of empowerment, external orientation, interdepartmental cooperation, and human-resource orientation. We are, however, unable to report that culture is related to objective financial performance. The finding that top leadership style affects firm performance supports the theory that charismatic leaders, by presenting an attractive vision and expressing confidence in followers, motivate their subordinates to exhibit extra effort, which in turn may increase financial performance. Our research design permits a causal inference because we use objective performance data at two points in time, over a two year time span. One might argue that performance also affects leadership style because objective performance might affect attributions of charismatic leadership. However, objective performance at time 2 was measured two years after measures of leader charisma were taken and the correlation between objective performance at Time 1 and at Time 2 is only moderate in size (r = .44). Employees who work in organizations that are managed by charismatic senior managers, with cultures characterized by organization practices of empowerment, external orientation, interdepartmental cooperation, and human-resource orientation, tend to think that their company is performing well. Because we control for objective performance at Time 1, it is less likely that the results can be attributed to knowledge of financial results. Also, the results cannot be affected by common rater bias because the raters who assess leadership and culture are different from those who assess perceived organizational performance. Therefore, the present study suggests that charismatic leadership and culture affect perceived performance, although reciprocal effects cannot be excluded. Similarly, the relationships between leadership style and the facets of culture cannot be attributed to common-rater bias because we use the split-sample method. On this score the research design does not allow for a causal inference; leadership style might affect culture and vice versa. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that charismatic leaders are found in cultures defined by these well-selected organizational practices. Given that the person–environment relationship of human behavior is reciprocal in nature (Bandura, 1986), as well as in keeping with the lack of empirical studies that have looked at reciprocity between organizational culture and leadership style (Hartnell and Walumbwa, 2011 and Parry and Proctor-Thomson, 2003), future research must delve into their likely reciprocal effects. Dutch leadership and human resource practices differ from those in the United States, and our results may be on the conservative side because Dutch managers are unable to be as directive as, for example, American managers. Dutch culture, based on the famous Polder Model in which consensus of differing opinions is a primary objective, encourages employees to state their opinions and encourages managers to strive for consensus with subordinates before making decisions. This characteristic is formalized in Dutch companies in Works Councils, in which committees of rank and file workers review management decisions in the spirit of codetermination (Wiersma & Van Den Berg, 1999). Moreover, whereas evidence suggests that charismatic leaders in the United States are extrovert, flamboyant, directive, and type-A personalities, their Dutch counterparts are introvert, reflective, consultative, and type-Bs (Koopman, 1991). Although not all findings need to be replicated in other cultures, it is prudent to do so where differences in how the macro cultures operate raise doubts concerning generalizability. It is somewhat surprising that organizational culture is not directly related to financial performance. High-quality organizational work practices are costly and time consuming to develop and perhaps such practices cannot be expected to increase profitability in the short run. Thus, it seems likely that the effect of culture on performance may take more than two years (Crook, Todd, Combs, Woehr, & Ketchen, 2011; Shamir, 2011). Denison (1984), for example, highlights the importance of a large time lag between implementation and effect. The lack of a relationship between culture and objective financial performance also indicates that, at least in the two year time interval covered by this study, the effect of charismatic leadership on financial performance is not mediated by culture. No wonder then that most senior managers with short term orientations do not ‘burn their fingers’ on culture change. Accordingly, Harris and Ogbonna (2002) warn quite explicitly of the unintended consequences of culture interventions. Restriction of range may also explain why culture and performance are unrelated in this study. The study was conducted within a single industry and within a single Dutch bank. An advantage of this design feature is that the firms have similar environments and that the survey items apply to all branch offices because those offices belong to the same overall company while still being independent enough to show differences in the variables of interest. Also, this relatively homogeneous sample of branch offices offsets the limited number of control variables used. However, it is precisely because the local branch offices are part of a single large company that the branch office cultures will necessarily show less variance than if they had come from entirely different companies. The moderate correlation between perceived performance and financial performance at Time 1 (r = .35; p < .05) is most likely because corporate financial performance is dependent on many factors outside of management control such as competitors, market conditions, and overall economics. We use financial, as well as perceived performance because both measures have advantages. Financial performance is the main criterion for most organizations. However, it neglects factors such as financial investments on which there have been no returns to date, relationships with clients and providers, and future opportunities. Perceived performance is a broader outcome concept, but being subjective, it is subject to rater biases. A limitation of this study is that we do not control for changes in top management in the branches. There are no indications that new top managers were installed, but in the event that changes did occur the effects of charismatic leadership are on the conservative side in the sense that, without any changes in top management positions, the relationships with charismatic leadership will probably be stronger. Another potential limitation concerns the small sample size of 58/46 branches. However, it should be noted that the perceptual variables are based on the ratings of 1509/1214 employees and that they are very reliable. In addition, the objective financial data are reliable. This strengthens the conclusions that can be drawn from the results. A practical implication of the study is that organizations should select top managers who have charisma. Such leaders appear to have positive effects on an organization's performance, and most likely on its culture as well. For the same reasons, top-management training should focus on charismatic behaviors such as articulating an attractive vision, expressing confidence in followers, taking personal risks, and building identification with the group. It should be noted that the MLQ focuses more on socialized than on personalized aspects of charisma. A differentiation between these aspects is important because personalized, narcissistic, and toxic charismatic leaders represent the so-called dark side of charismatic leadership (e.g., Brown and Trevino, 2009 and Ligon et al., 2008). Personalized charismatic leaders are more concerned with their own interests and may actually harm the company, whereas socialized charismatic leaders are more altruistic. Therefore, organizations should focus selection and training of leaders on socialized charismatic behaviors. In addition, organizations are advised to improve their culture by stimulating the practices of empowerment, external orientation, interdepartmental cooperation, and human-resource orientation, given that this study established that they are strongly related to perceived firm performance and do match well with socialized charismatic leadership. As a result, employees may perceive higher levels of performance in the short term, but the effects on financial performance have yet to be demonstrated. The employed set of organizational work practices can be seen also as an additive set of “positive practices” that Cameron, Mora, Leutscher and Calarco (2011) recently came up with, and they may stimulate the thus far separately ongoing abstract discourse of seeing organizations as organizing practices, known as the “practice turn” (Feldman & Orlikowski, 2011). Clearly, more studies are needed that examine the effects of sets of carefully chosen organizational practices on the financial performance over a longer period of time and with multiple measures along the way. From an intangible organizational-resource perspective, the most important finding of this longitudinal study is that the intangible factor, charismatic leadership style, leads to high objective firm performance. This finding is not trivial, particularly if placed in the perspective of the “186 intangibles” (Barney, Ketchen, & Wright, 2011, p. 1311) that have been studied by scholars who operate largely outside leadership theory. Our main finding may convince non-leadership scholars to take the intangible, charismatic leadership factor more seriously. Thus, now that we have disentangled specific organizational leadership and cultural forces, we have shown that charismatic leadership theory contributes to the broader academic study of the competitive advantage of human capital: in addition to more tangible capital (see, e.g., Crook et al., 2011 and Hansen and Wernerfelt, 1989). Moreover, given that intangible resources are not always sufficiently exploited in an organization (see, also, Ennen and Richter, 2010 and Ployhart et al., 2009), new in-depth studies of the link between socialized charismatic leadership and firm culture are needed. The results of the present study are promising enough to undertake tests of reciprocal causal links between charismatic leadership and culture (Hartnell & Walumbwa, 2011). Both constructs must then be measured several times using cross-lagged analyses. In addition to socialized charismatic top leadership, organizational culture is expected to have a positive effect, over time. The results of the current study clearly point to this proposition, thereby underscoring the view of Barney et al. (2011, p. 1311) that “there is considerable scope for further research that examines…human and social capital resources.” The results of the present study may prompt field investigations on the simultaneous effects of socialized charismatic leadership training and organizational culture-improvement programs (see, also, Antonakis et al., 2011 and Jung and Takeuchi, 2010). If leadership studies would branch out more into such dynamic learning or actual social-change directions (see, also, Gardner et al., 2010, Jung and Takeuchi, 2010 and Levay, 2010), the needed insight into the joint effects of leadership and organizational culture is likely to spark (see, also, Kelloway and Barling, 2010 and Mayer et al., 2009). For this to happen we advocate longitudinal studies on “the interaction of social structure and agency in creating conditions for stability and change” (Dover & Lawrence, 2010, p. 306). Also Ng and Feldman (2010, p. 709) noted that new studies would need to better “distinguish among …various types of internal social capital….” Therefore, our key future-research point is that the field is in need of research that more precisely specifies and assesses the intra-organizational effects of intangible “everyday actions” (Feldman and Orlikowski, 2011 and Smith, 2010) of charismatic leaders (e.g., Antonakis et al., 2011). In that spirit, once distinct literatures on human's organizing capital—such as that of organizational leadership and culture—must be paired much more often (Crook et al., 2011, Ford et al., 2008 and Hartnell and Walumbwa, 2011). This study examines two intangible, intra-firm resources with roots in leadership and culture theory that in terms of strategy- or management-theorizing approximate the variables “quality of supervision” and “cultural norms” (Coff & Kryscynski, 2011, p. 1436). We find these two latter terms imprecisely formulated. We argue, based on the results of this study, that the fairly abstract capability-performance perspective on organizations (rooted, amongst others, in contingency and resource-based theory) may borrow from leadership studies, like this one, specificity on how an organization may “extract the most out of its resources” (Auh & Menguc, 2009, p. 767, 757). Carefully prepared longitudinal action research of these “cross-level components of human capital-based advantages” (Coff & Kryscynski, 2011, p. 1429; Molloy, Chadwick, Ployhart, & Golden, 2011) is likely to lead to better orchestrated management scholarship which in turn may lift its own competitive advantage.