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Despite the vast amount of research within the leadership and culture domains, a paucity of research has integrated the two literatures. This dissertation investigates leadership, organizational culture, and the dynamic interplay between them. It is composed of three papers with

Despite the vast amount of research within the leadership and culture domains, a paucity of research has integrated the two literatures. This dissertation investigates leadership, organizational culture, and the dynamic interplay between them. It is composed of three papers with the objective to integrate leadership and culture research, theoretically and empirically, and generate novel insights about both phenomena. Paper 1 describes how leader-unit interactions foster culture emergence. I integrate insights from social learning theory, self-regulation theory, and event-structure theory to enumerate how leader-unit interactions create values, beliefs, and underlying assumptions that become shared among members in a nascent work unit. Paper 2 integrates team motivation theory with multilevel leadership theory to address CEO task leadership's paradoxical effect on firm performance through intervening social (i.e., organizational culture) and psychological (i.e., TMT engagement) mechanisms. Using data from 106 CEOs and 324 top management team members, structural equation modeling results revealed that CEO task leadership enhanced firm performance through its positive association with task culture, which in turn was positively related to TMT engagement, which positively contributed to firm performance. Conversely, CEO task leadership hindered firm performance through its negative, direct effect on TMT engagement. Paper 3 integrates various approaches to organizational culture bandwidth that have produced a fragmented view of culture and its effects on organizational outcomes. I draw upon organizational culture theory and bandwidth theory to examine the incremental predictive validity of culture configurations and culture dimensions on broad and narrow criteria. Hierarchical linear regression analyses, from data consisting of 567 employees in 130 bank branches, indicated that narrow culture dimensions predicted variance in narrow outcomes whereas configurations explained incremental variance in broad outcomes above and beyond culture dimensions. Through this dissertation, I take an initial step toward illuminating the interrelationship between leadership and culture by identifying mechanisms through which unit leaders foster culture emergence and by examining how organizational culture is a social normative lens through which followers filter leader behavior. Given culture's importance to leadership and organizational outcomes, the conditions in which culture should be examined as a broad or a narrow phenomenon are also enumerated.
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    Title
    • Leadership and organizational culture: an integrative view of leaders as culture creators and culture as social context
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    Date Created
    2012
    Resource Type
  • Text
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    • thesis
      Partial requirement for: Ph. D., Arizona State University, 2012
    • bibliography
      Includes bibliographical references (p. 130-150)
    • Field of study: Business administration

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    by Chad Hartnell

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