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Organisational Culture and Innovation: Role of Leadership

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DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.1.3415.9843

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 Organisational Culture and Innovation
Role of Leadership

Mahmoud M. Akel

1
Table of Contents
1 Abstract ................................................................................................... 3
2 Literature Review.................................................................................... 4
2.1 What is organisational culture? ........................................................ 4
2.2 How does organisational culture interact?........................................ 7
2.2.1 Culture and Innovation and change ........................................... 8
2.2.2 Culture and Values ..................................................................... 9
2.2.3 Culture and People ................................................................... 10
2.2.4 Culture and organisation .......................................................... 11
2.3 Cultural change ............................................................................... 14
3 Case Study............................................................................................. 16
3.1 Organisation Overview ................................................................... 16
3.1.1 Values and Myths ..................................................................... 17
3.1.2 Culture and subcultures............................................................ 18
3.2 Innovation Initiative ....................................................................... 23
3.2.1 Innovation trigger..................................................................... 23
3.2.2 Organisational reaction ............................................................ 24
3.2.3 Analysis of reaction ................................................................. 25
4 Recommendations ................................................................................. 26
4.1 Establishing understanding ............................................................. 26
4.2 Building support ............................................................................. 27
4.3 Gradual implementation ................................................................. 27
4.4 Linking to values ............................................................................ 27
5 Bibliography.......................................................................................... 28

2
1 Abstract

The aim of this essay is to highlight the relationship between

organisational culture and innovation and the role that leadership can play in
this relationship.
To have a clear understanding of this relationship, a case study of an
organisational experience will be used side to side with a brief review of
related literatures.
The areas related to the subject of this essay are very attractive areas of
research. Thus, there is an enormous amount of literatures available for
researchers. To set a clear path through available literatures, the literature
review will aim to answer some related questions in the following order:

1. What is organisational culture?

2. How does organisational culture interact with:
a. Innovation and change?
b. Values?
c. People (including leaders)?
d. Organisation?
3. Is organisational culture change possible?

The second part of the essay includes a case study on the subject while the
third part provides recommendations of improvement by reflecting the theory
on the experience.

3
2 Literature Review

The literature review will provide a high-level theoretical background to

help reaching an understanding of different theories related to the case study
and apply these theories on a practical example to be able to analyse the
behaviours at the organisation level as well as the personal level and their
interaction within the organisational culture.

The reason of analysing the behaviour is the agreement with many

researchers those referred to organisational and people behaviour as the
clearest indication of culture. This was clear to the extent that Hofstede (cited
in (Ulijn and Weggeman, 2001: 492)), one of the most known researchers in
organisational culture, referred to culture as ‘behaviour of people based upon
a mental programming and its relation with language’

To avoid getting into long discussions of different theories of this rich

subject, the literature review will be limited to answering few questions those
are directly related to the essay subject.

2.1 What is organisational culture?

While going through many references to find a definition of organisational

culture, I recalled a statement by Stogdill’s conclusion regarding the definition
of leadership: ‘There are almost as many definitions of leadership
development as there are persons who have attempted to define the concept’
(Yukl, 2013: 2).

The same statement would very much apply on the definition of

organisational culture. The more sources you consult for definition, the more
definitions you will have. Figure 1 hereafter summarizes some of the
definitions suggested by different researchers as quoted in ( (Schein, 2010);
(Brooks, 2009); (Liker and Hoseus, 2008)).

4
 Figure 1: Different definitions of organisational culture

One of the shortest and oldest definitions of organisational culture that is

still in use by many writers is the definition of Bower (1966) who defined
culture as: ‘The way we do things around here’. Being very simple and direct,
this definition is probably the most often quoted definition (Price, 2007: 218).

Bower’s definition helps in describing culture as a phenomenon but it does

not help when it comes to more details analysis in an effort to understand its
effect and the factors those affect it, if any.

In the 1980’s and 1990’s, the culture became a hot topic of management
studies (Morgan, 2006) and many writers started to explore different aspects
and levels of cultures in an attempt to find ways of utilising cultures in
organisational improvement.

In the more recent endeavors to define culture, one can agree with the
conclusion of (Alvesson and Sveningsson, 2008: 36) that culture is not a social
structure of behaviour, but it is the mental phenomena that initiates and directs
behaviours.

5
 Many consulted literatures referred to the work of Edgar Schein as a
‘fairly influential’ model that establishes a good ground to understand and
analyse organisational culture ( (Alvesson and Sveningsson, 2008); (Brooks,
2009); (Liker and Hoseus, 2008); (Ulijn and Weggeman, 2001)).

In his attempt to define culture, (Schein,

2010: 21) suggested that any group of
people, or social unit, that has a shared
history between its member would develop
its own culture. This is a very interesting
entrance to the subject, as it will lead to a
conclusion of having different cultures
interacting and changing each other,
reaching to the biggest group of humankind. Figure 2: Schein’s levels of culture

In this context, Schein defines the culture as:

‘A pattern of shared basic assumptions learned by a group as

it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal
integration, that has worked well enough to be considered valid
and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way
to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems’ (Schein,
2010: 18).

The definition of Schein was considered as an influential definition but it

drives to question the way of recognising and studying these basic
assumptions.
(Schein, 2010) suggested three levels of culture, under which, two can be
noticed and analysed, especially the first one that is also visible.
The third level of culture, Schein claims, is embedded in the individuals’
beliefs and values and it actually constitutes the ‘ultimate source of values and
actions’.

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 A suggestion of different culture levels emerges by moving from national
to organisational scale. This way of looking at cultures can be presented in
figure 3 where the cultures share some characteristics and differ in others
based on the level of existence, which causes a differentiation in locales,
history, people and leaders (Liker and Hoseus, 2008: 18).
Most of the researchers noticed that inside any culture, subcultures may
exist and can be distinguished from the larger culture. This is true for
organisational culture as much as it is true for national culture. ( (Alvesson
and Sveningsson, 2008); (Brooks, 2009); (Hofstede, 2001); (Schein, 2010))

Figure 3: Cultures interactions

2.2 How does organisational culture interact?

Accepting the assumption that organisational culture consists of

subcultures and exist within larger industrial, local, national or universal
cultures leads to investigating the kind of interaction that might exist between
organisational culture and different factors affecting cultures.
Only some of these factors will be reviewed in this section based on their
role in understanding the case study.

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 2.2.1 Culture and Innovation and change

The reason of having innovation and change under one section is that,
each of them is needed for the other to be successful. Change is needed for
cultures to become innovative according to (Pedler, Burgoyne and Boydell,
2010) and innovation is the most important way for organisations to change
in today’s global business environment as reported by (Barsh, Capozzi and
Davidson, 2008).
Many researchers, including (Holbeche, 2006) suggested that, having a
culture that supports innovation is an essential characteristic of high
performance organisations. This suggestion in link with organisational culture,
lead to the investigation of how to build an innovative culture.
For successful organisations in building innovation and getting rewards
out of it, innovation is not a process or something good to have. It represents
a core value for the culture to be built on as noted by ( (Peters and Waterman,
1982) cited in (Morgan, 2006)).
While (Holbeche, 2006) added the knowledge-sharing and knowledge-
creation to innovation under one characteristic of high performance
organisations, new studies in the field emphasised on the importance of
knowledge-sharing and help-giving within an organisation to encourage
invention and innovation. ( (Grant, 2013); (Long et al., 2012)).

Figure 4: Innovation and knowledge sharing (Long et al., 2012: 9560)

The previous argument shows the importance of understanding how

culture influence knowledge sharing and innovation consequently. (De Long
and Fahey (2000) cited in (Tong, Wah Tak and Wong, 2013) identified four
ways that organizational culture influences knowledge-related behaviours:
culture defines assumptions about which knowledge is important; it creates

8
the organizational context for social interactions; it mediates the relationships
among individual, group, and organizational knowledge; and it impacts the
adoption and creation of new knowledge.

What helps building an innovative culture?

(Ulijn and Weggeman, 2001: 489) quoted four things to do and four things
to avoid in building innovation culture, from the Vice President of 3M, a
company that built its success on innovation by setting a value of ‘never kill a
product’.
Other researchers listed more than twenty suggestions to make a company
more innovative (Pedler, Burgoyne and Boydell, 2010: 31). Some of the key
suggestions, those are related to the case study are:
- Taking more risks
- Support from managers for taking risks
- Support from colleagues to try new things
- Talking about the job and your practice
- Much more experimenting, trying new things out
- Being less critical, more appreciative of other people’s efforts
- Encourage people to run with their ideas
- Combine ideas, build on suggestions
- Trying out things that worked in other companies
- Sharing the knowledge with workers across the company
- Encourage people to move round and change teams
- Encourage job shadowing
- High diversity of people in the company

2.2.2 Culture and Values

A simple definition of values, with relation to the organisational culture,

states that value is ‘a broad tendency to prefer certain states of affairs over
others’ (Hofstede, 2001: 5).
It was argued by (Schein, 2010) that values of the organisation, amongst
other factors, are the cause of the seen symbols of culture. However, Schein
also refers these values to the imbedded values and beliefs of individuals in
the group.

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 The organisational values may occur in the way the organisation tend to
act within its environment as suggested in the ‘competing value framework’
of (Cameron and Quinn, 2011) that will be discussed under the culture
interaction with organisation.
On a larger scale, cultural values may affect organisational performance
positively or negatively based on their consistency with the adopted strategy
as suggested by (Yukl, 2013).
Many researchers, including (Hofstede, 2001), (Javidan, House and
Dorfman, 2004) studied the cultural values and their effect on organisational
and people behaviours. Some of these researches will be used in the analysis
of the case study.

2.2.3 Culture and People

From the definition of culture, one can draw a two-side arrow between
people and culture.
Culture emerges from people. The beliefs and values of the founders and
leaders, the learning experiences of group members and new beliefs, values
and assumptions of new members are the sources of culture (Schein, 2010:
219).
However, once the culture is established, it is very difficult to change it
even if the members of the group changed. In this side, culture is actually
affecting people’s way to perceive, think and feel about experiences they face
with the organisation (Schein, 2010).
While discussing the interaction between organisational culture and
people, one must not forget that the organisational leadership is part of the
people interacting with culture.
Leaders create the culture at the very early stage of the organisation’s life
by their beliefs and values. They maintain the culture at the same track by
setting the criteria of selecting new leaders and by managing cultural change
to survive in changing environment (Schein, 2010: 22).
On the other hand, the organisational culture affects the performance of
leaders. The researches of (Cameron and Quinn, 2011) confirmed the
relationship between leadership competencies and organisational culture in
the sense that if the competencies of the leader are congruent with the

10
dominant organisational culture, they will be more successful that other
leaders of conflicting competencies.
When people within the organisation are interacting, the political side of
management starts to appear. Adopting one strategic direction or discarding
another is often considered as a result of power politics between stakeholders
(Johnson, Scholes and Whittington , 2008). Responding to changing
environment and attempting to change the organisation requires political
management, which in turn affects the people’s behaviour, and drive them to
be retaining knowledge rather than sharing it (Holbeche, 2006).

2.2.4 Culture and organisation

As discussed earlier, organisational culture is the outcome of different

factors interacting within the organisation. The effect of different factors
during certain stages of the organisational lifecycle will be discussed under
the culture change hereafter.
In their work to understand cultures, most of the viewed works used some
sort of typology to categorise the subject of study. Typologies are important in
the sense that they attempt to order a great variety of different phenomena,
argues (Schein, 2010: 158), however; Schein notes, there is always a danger
that they might limit the attention span and drive to conclusions without
enough analysis.

This danger noticed by Schein was supported by (Schultz, 2011) who

described how two banks, being highly institutionalised organisations,
operating in the same institutional environment, acted differently towards the
crisis, and reached different results.

Although that Schultz used the example to support his argument of the
organisational culture role as a filter, yet it can be interpreted that the two
institutions developed their own model on how things work as Schein argued
which lead to more analysis in one case.

In his famous work to analyse cultures across nations, (Hofstede, 2001)

used five cultural dimensions to categorise different national cultures.

11
Although that the work of applies to national cultures, but it is very important
to understand organisational cultures since they are affected by their
macrocultures (Schein, 2010).

Other attempts to find out the types of cultures used different factors such
as authority and intimacy (Etzioni (1975) cited in (Schein, 2010)), cultural
essences in organisations (Harrison (1979) and Handy (1978) cited in (Schein,
2010)), task and team building (Blake and Mouton (1964, 1969, 1989) cited
in (Schein, 2010)), and flexibility and focus (Cameron and Quinn, 2011).

In their work to diagnose organisational culture types, Cameron and Quinn,

2011 used a list of thirty-nine indicators of organisational effectiveness
developed by (Campbell, Brownas, Peterson, and Dunnette (1974) cited in
(Cameron and Quinn, 2011: 38)) and statistically clustered these factors into
four main clusters under two major dimensions. These two dimensions, named
the competing values framework, form four quadrants, each representing a
distinct set of organisational effectiveness indicators, as illustrated in figure 5.

Figure 5: The competing values framework (Cameron and Quinn, 2011)

Based on the competing values framework, Cameron and Quinn

developed what they claim to be ‘probably the most frequently used
instrument for assessing organisational culture in the world today’ (Cameron
and Quinn, 2011: 27)
The Organisational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI) helps in
providing a picture of the fundamental assumptions within an organisation

12
and the values that charactrise it.
OCAI consists of six items with four alternative for each, and a score of
100 for each item. It has two score columns, one for ‘Now’ that rates the
company in the current state and one labeled ‘preferred’ that shows what the
rater would like the company to be.
The rating distributed on the four alternatives of each item according to
the rater belief of importance or validity.
The rating results are listed in a special table and the average reading is
used to plot the result on the four-quadrant diagram. Connecting between the
points on the diagram shows a quick profile of the organisational culture.
Normally, the profile will be distributed over all the four quadrants, with
more presence in one or two quadrants showing the priorities of the
organisation.
Figure 6 illustrates the four different organisational profiles suggested by
Cameron and Quinn.

Figure 6: Organisational culture profile (Cameron and Quinn, 2011: 75)

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2.3 Cultural change

At different stages of organisational maturity, there are change

mechanisms affecting the organisational culture and shaping it in a natural
evolution process. (Schein, 2010) suggested that these mechanisms are
cumulative in the sense that they co-exist in later stages with new ones. The
change mechanisms and their existence in the relevant stages, as suggested by
Schein, are illustrated in figure 7.

Figure 7: Culture change mechanisms

Schein considers this type of change as ‘normal evolution’ of cultures.

Linking the concept of evolution with change theories, one finds that,
evolution is the incremental type of the transformational change, a
fundamental change that entails the taken-for-granted assumptions (Balogun
and Hope Hailey, 2004: 21). The other type of transformational change is the
revolution change, which occurs via simultaneous initiatives on many fronts,
and often in a relatively short space of time (Balogun and Hope Hailey, 2004:
24).
Based on the discussion of transformational change types, we conclude
that, changing organisational culture is not only natural. There are cases where
this change become intentional and necessary to correct the direction of the
organisation, to respond to environmental changes or to implement a new
strategy.

14
 It was argued that; organisations those are not changing are recalcitrant.
That is because of the nature of today’s business that makes it difficult for any
organisation to accurately predict the future, and maintain constancy of
direction while staying current. (Cameron and Quinn, 2011)
Although that many writers see the chances of achieving a large-scale
cultural change very low (Alvesson and Sveningsson, 2008), to the extent that
some writers linked it to a change in the river’s velocity or direction (Hayes,
2010: 42), there still considerable attempts to develop a workable framework
for culture change.
According to (Schein, 2010: 299), fundamental assumptions underlying
any change in a human system, including organisational culture, are derived
from Kurt Lewin (1947).
This can be noticed by reviewing different approaches introduced by
several writers including:
The framework of (Schein, 2010) with three stages and seven steps, the
eight stages process of change suggested by (Kotter, 2010), the six steps of
grand technocratic project of (Alvesson (2002) cited in (Alvesson and
Sveningsson, 2008), and the nine steps based on the competing value
framework of (Cameron and Quinn, 2011), where there are many similarities
in the four approaches.

The main areas of similarity between the reviewed approaches are:

1. Joint analysis of the current state. Identifying main issues and creating
a consensus on their importance.
2. Identifying the desired culture.
3. Developing the change plan with clear roles and responsibilities.
4. Incorporating and maintaining new approaches.

Some items were shares between two approaches only, but they have
strong links to the theories behind other approaches. A good example is the
small wins tactic suggested by (Cameron and Quinn, 2011) that matches with
the short-term wins in Kotter’s approach. Repeated small wins work as proofs
of the theory and turns the hypothesis to reality, which help in changing the
deep assumptions of people as (Schein, 2010: 27) noticed.

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3 Case Study

This case study is prepared based on personal experience of working in

the subject organisation for more than eight years. I joined the company
immediately after graduation and after two years, I became a corporate
manager for Tenders Department (TD), a department responsible for
preparation and submission of large proposals.
After four years of working with the old style in the department, I
suggested a more organised style to be implemented. The case study will cover
my experience of introducing new way of working and the reaction I received
from the organisation.

3.1 Organisation Overview

The subject organisation is an Information Technology (IT) company with

more than twenty five years of experience at the time I joined it. The company
was a section in the mother company that started business in the 1960’s then
was spinoff to become a member of a larger group headed by the founder who
takes the decision of hiring executive officials for the group’s companies.
In addition to the IT Company, the group included an office furniture and
equipment company and few specialised factories producing office
automation related products.
While the founder and chairman of the group was satisfied with the
performance of other group’s companies, he was criticising the performance
of the IT company and changing its higher management in relatively short
terms (less than five years was the longest time a CEO served).
The IT Company, at the time of innovation experience, employed more
than two thousand employees of different nationalities, distributed
geographically on three main regions of the country.
The organisational structure was divided into two levels; the corporate
level and the regional level. In the corporate level, there was ten corporate
managers reporting to the CEO and providing their services to the regions.
The corporate office was responsible for developing and implementing the
strategy and providing centralised services to the regions, including:

16
procurement, marketing, and proposal management service that was my
responsibility.
In the regional levels, a team of business unit managers reporting to the
general manager of the region was responsible for the operation side of the
business. Each region had its own profit and loss statement and the corporate
office overhead is distributed over the three regions.
The CEO of the company was selected to lead the company after a series
of resignations of the first line managers due to conflicts with the previous
CEO. The selection was based on his previous success in his position as a
general manager of one of the three main regions.

3.1.1 Values and Myths

Although that the company had no written values or documented strategy,

it was obvious that the main values of the company are:
- Loyalty: Was highly promoted by the founder and senior staff.
Employees who spent more years with the company were treated in a
special way. It was normal to see people who spent 20 years in the
company.
- Hard working: Most of the departments were understaffed which
caused a normal practice of staying late after official working hours to
complete unfinished tasks.
- Customer satisfaction: One call from an unhappy customer was
enough to topple the company upside down.

There were some stories going around in the company those can be
considered as the local myths. Two of them were very famous and preferred
to be told by the employees.

Story I
During the service of the first CEO of the company after the spinoff, who
was behind the idea of establishing a separate company for IT services, the
management team did a mistake in preparing a large bid and the company was
disqualified from that bid accordingly. The CEO and his Vice President
decided to tell the chairman that they lost the bid because of high price and

17
not mention what happened to avoid any blame. Few days later, the chairman
knew the fact and he was very upset because they did not tell him the truth.
He called them both to his office and asked them to submit their resignations.
In two days they left the company and the chairman assigned one of the
regional managers as action CEO till he appointed a new one.

Story II
A sales manager in one of the regions was managing the relationship with
an important client. He was selling everything that client might need, whither
it is a product of the company or not. He was able to convince the purchasing
department at the client side to buy tires for their vehicles from an IT company,
not to mention the vehicles itself. He was one of the three regional general
managers when I joined the company.

3.1.2 Culture and subcultures

Being a spinoff from a larger company with the same employees and
sharing the same building of the group was a reason to inherit many aspects
from the mother company.
Over years, the IT company developed its own culture with several
subcultures those were clear enough for observer.
The main subcultures those were clear then are:

Regional subcultures
Two of the three main regions were somehow different in their cultures
from the corporate office and the main region that shares the same building
with corporate office.
The two remote regions enjoyed more relaxed and less stressed culture in
terms of office hours and urgency of responding to requirements. Some of the
newly joined employees were not able to adopt to working style in the head
office and decided to leave. However, some of them were moved to another
region where they were able to become part of the team and continued
working for years.

18
 Departmental cultures
Some of the departments across the company had a kind of internal bound
that distinguished them from other departments.
The customer services department for example had a high level of
teamwork and knowledge sharing. This was noticeable not only within the
customer service department in one region, but also between the three
departments across the regions.

Corporate culture
The corporate office was the court of politics. For a new graduate without
any experience in business and many ideal thoughts about cooperation and
teamwork, it was a real shock to me when I started to notice the political games
between corporate managers. That was the area of ‘what is in it for me?’ This
question I heard every time I requested a help or suggested a new idea.

The previous description is like an interview for a researcher to understand

the full picture of the organisation. It helps understanding the general
atmosphere but not the organisational culture.
However, to use a systematic way to diagnose the organisational culture,
I used the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI) developed
by Cameron and Quinn that helps uncover unidentifiable aspects of the
organisational culture (Cameron and Quinn, 2011: 95).

I have to admit that the results were quite surprising to me. If I was to
descibe the organisational culture in light of different theories from my point
of view, it will look like:
- No focus.
- High risk (uncertainty) avoidance
- Hierarchy
- Fragmented
- Role oriented
- High power distance

However, the outcome profile was, to a far extent, representing the profile
of the company as I understand it.
The profile shows high tendency to market type of organisation with

19
medium focus on control and flexibility.
With the detailed profiles of items used to build the general profile, the
company shows clan charactersitics, those were inherited form the mother
company established by the founder of the group, and also shows that it is the
clan attributes those glue the company together with the hard worh to achieve
goals and have a bigger market share.
While the congruence of leadership and criteria of success looks logical,
since the leadership sets the criteria and strategy focusing on the market.
It is important to mention that only the “now” scores are filled down as
the main objective is to get a clear culture profile.
The following figures illustrate the results of this exercise as tables and as
plotted diagrams.

Figure 8: OCAI scoring - Part I

20
 Figure 9: OCAI scoring - Part II

Figure 10: Organisational culture profile

21
 Figure 11: Profiles for individual items on the OCAI

22
3.2 Innovation Initiative

After five years of working in the Tenders Department, I submitted a

proposal to the CEO suggesting a new way of handling the internal work to
improve quality of proposals and help meeting some requirements from other
departments involved in bidding process.

3.2.1 Innovation trigger

The Tenders Department was responsible for proposals submission across

the company. TD played a coordination role between different departments of
the company in addition to the interaction with the clients.
Figure 12 summarises the roles of different parties in the tender
preparation and submission.

Figure 12: Roles of other departments in tenders

There were always complaints from different parties. Most of them were
related to late discussion of prices and giving a very short time to Finance
Department to check and analyse costs.
Some of the issues were related to TD internal process of tenders, while
other issues were coming from different departments.
It was obvious that we need a unified and clear process of bids preparation
with deadlines and tracking mechanism for follow up.
Since I was not experienced in process management, I asked for training
and suggested to get an ISO 9000 training to be able to develop the procedure
manual for the Tenders Department.
However, the CEO did not approve the training and I had to ask for unpaid
leave and get the training at my own cost.
After the training, I developed the procedure manual with clear

23
responsibility on my department and a complete list of actions to be taken
under each department with supporting forms to help tracking the process.

3.2.2 Organisational reaction

To evaluate the effect of organisational culture on the innovation initiative,

reactions of different levels of the organisation will be summarised in points.

CEO
- Kept the procedure manual without approval or review for two months.
- Signed the manual after daily follow up and pressure. While signing,
he commented: This will make things more difficult now.
- Refused to hold a meeting with all concerned employees to announce
that we will start working with the manual.
- Refused to circulate the manual to different regions.

Other Departments
There were two different reactions from other departments.
- Acceptance and support: From finance department as the proposed
new procedures gave more time for cost analysis and revisions.
- Rejection: Some departments refused to follow the proposed
procedures and ignored signing any form when we started using the
new forms. The main reason was that fear of responsibility in case of
delay, as the forms will allow proper time track for the preparation
process.

One indicative reaction came from a general manager of one of the regions,
I went to him to sign a form of receiving a bid document that his sales manager
refused to sign to avoid being accountable in case of delay. The general
manager signed the form and said: You know what is your problem? You want
us to be organised while we can not work in an organised environment!

Over time, we applied only 50% of the proposed new procedures. Main
suggested actions related to building a database of prices and adopting a
competitor analysis practice were not implemented at all.

24
 3.2.3 Analysis of reaction

Comparing the reaction to innovation proposal with recommendations of

researchers to create an innovative culture can easily reveal that the leadership
role was a key factor in killing the initiative.

I made many wrong steps in the way I introduced the proposal, as I will
explain in the recommendations section. However, there was a chance that the
initiative succeeds if encouraged and supported by the leadership.

Based on the culture profile, one can notice that the company culture was
not supportive for innovation, which requires risk taking, and the leadership
direction was to market positioning and better achievement with no attention
to invention promoted this culture rather than attempting to change it.

One of the other reasons for this reaction was the low diversity of people
in the company. As explained in the company overview, loyalty was
considered an important value and the turnover of employees was very low.
This made the culture very slow in evolution and maintained the old basic
assumptions almost untouched.

25
4 Recommendations

In this section, I will propose an implementation approach to apply the

new procedures in light of related theories. After going through the education
process, I believe that I could have achieved different results if I was to follow
more structured way in introducing the new procedures.
I believe that the proactive influence tactics suggested by (Yukl, 2013:
202) are very useful in cases of innovation proposals.
Yukl suggested that for new proposals, one should use the following
tactics:
- Rational persuasion
- Apprising
- Inspirational appeals
- Consultation
- Exchange
- Collaboration
- Personal appeals
- Ingratiation
- Legitimating tactics
- Pressure
In more details on this particular case, the following tasks would have
helped in better implementation if followed correctly:

4.1 Establishing understanding

There should be a common understanding for all the concerned people
regarding the need for a new procedure.
This understanding would help in what (Schein, 2010) calls it ‘unfreezing’
the current culture. People were used to certain routine in bid management
and it was working for a long time.
A collection of mistakes and issues emerging from the old procedure
presented to the concern staff would help in clarifying the need to them.
If this was implemented in right way, it could help overcoming the ‘fear
of punishment’ that made other departments resistant to the new procedure.

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4.2 Building support
One of the main mistakes I did was that I went with the new procedure to
the CEO to approve it without building enough support.
Having a discussion with the concerned people on the issues and what can
be done to resolve them and asking them to examine different approached to
resolve the issues would lead them to ‘adopt’ the change as their own.
The role of internal politics was totally neglected. Apart from ‘negative’
politics coming from corporate managers those will feel uncomfortable with
a new person trying to show off with new procedures, there was a lot to be
done with ‘positive’ politics by convincing other department managers who
are benefiting from the new procedure to build a support alliance.
Working with peers requires certain tactics to support the change. It was
easy to implement the new procedure in Tenders Department with my
subordinates. However, the ‘power gap’ ((Kotter, 1985) cited in (Buchanan
and Badham, 2008)) between the authorities I had and the authorities needed
to support the innovation was big and needed a lot of ‘positive politics’ to
overcome it.

4.3 Gradual implementation

Having a completely new procedure to apply for all concerned
departments with deadlines and official forms called for the rejection. It could
be implemented gradually with the departments with initial support. For
example, using part of the new procedure with finance department, that was
requesting the change at beginning, could establish a success case of workable
solution. This success can help changing what (Schein, 2010) calls ‘basic
underlying assumptions’.

4.4 Linking to values

Since the company was market driven as shown in the (OCAI) results in
the overview section, it would be helpful to show how the new procedure will
change our market competitiveness. The leadership focus on the market share
at first place would become a good incentive for the CEO to give more support
to the proposal.

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