Culture and Leadership 4

In the last byte, we looked at how an organizational culture would be reflected in how the  leaders behave. In today's byte, we look at how one could understand organizational culture from how leaders allocate resources.

Rewards are widely used by organizations to get the expected behavior. Leaders could use these rewards to encourage and ensure that the values of the organization are consistently followed by all employees. 

Lets take a couple of examples:

1. Imaging a company where it is generally heard that there is a pay-for-performance system implemented. If the company at  point of offering increments decides to increase the compensation based on the years of service with the company rather than performance, think of the feeling an employee who has performed exceptionally well but relatively new into the organization!
2. Imagine a second company where the company claims its value to be teamwork. They form cross-functional terms and empower these teams to make important decisions, however when there is the point of performance appraisal the criteria for rating employees focuses on individual performances!

The confusing signals to the employees about the company's culture could demotivate the employees.