Why leaders perform a crucial role in changing organizational values

Leaders and senior managers shape the business environment. Their insights, beliefs, and attitudes directly affect the direction of the organization. A leader’s viewpoints and preferences help create a permanent guideline for employees that points to the appropriate performance measures. Such a guideline is a framework that tells employees how to fulfill organizational goals.

In a prosperous organization, leaders are the symbol of the thoughts, insights, and values they have set for the employees. They symbolize a standard performance that inspires employees and shows them the right way. In many successful companies, a leader creates and fosters a positive environment where people start to grow and do what is right.

Leaders shape the organizational environment by defining values and insights by which people are encouraged to do their best work. Although leaders define the set of organizational values and provide directions, this does not mean that they can expect unquestionable obedience from employees. Changing organizational culture is a fairly long-term process. For changing organizational culture, leaders need to change behaviors, insights, and values. Understanding the elements of the old culture of an organization may help leaders to decide about the desirable and undesirable components.

Stimulating employees to adapt to the new cultural values and embedding new cultural components into the work is directly associated with the leader’s capability and skill.

Leadership behaviors encourage employees to boost their productivity and creativity. Strong and clear values help the organization to prosper and grow. A clear set of values should include future programs about the quality of employees’ performance.

Leaders create the experience that employees can learn from and can follow. The process of building a new culture that contains a new set of values and attitudes is only possible only if leaders behave in an exemplary fashion themselves.