Leadership Research Summary:
• There are two big problems related to leadership today: unequal representation and high failure rates among leaders. This conceptual paper argues that commonly shared values, assumptions, and beliefs about leadership, i.e., universal leadership culture, are the common cause of both problems. After the concepts and levels related to leadership culture were explained, we introduce a multilevel, multi-actor process model named the bottleneck metaphor of leadership culture.
• This metaphor describes how leadership cultures are co-constructed by multiple actors based on their involvement in leader selection and reproduce themselves in groups over time based on emergent leaders’ characteristics. Next, a diagnostic tool called “the leadership mirror” is proposed for organizations that want to assess their leadership culture’s current state as a starting point for further interventions. Specific suggestions are made for various actors, ranging from individuals to organizations, for their possible roles in preventing undesired leadership cultures.
Leadership Research Findings:
• Existing leaders must be aware of their crucial direct and indirect gatekeeper roles in creating and reproducing bottlenecks of leadership culture (Broockman, 2014). It should always be kept in mind that leaders’ influences within the scope of bottlenecks are not limited to what they do or whom they select and promote. These also include the things that they choose not to do and the characteristics of the candidates that they did not consider for the vacant seats. Moreover, how followers and potential candidates perceive leaders’ and organizations’ behaviors and decisions is essential (Jacobsen and Bøgh Andersen, 2015). Thus, current leaders should ensure that they precisely convey the messages they want to communicate regarding their organizations’ leadership culture to candidates and applicants.
• Organizations should acknowledge three things about the leadership culture that can impose bottlenecks for much-desired leadership diversity and effectiveness. Suppose the group’s leadership culture is permitted to develop and change in its natural course. In that case, bold candidates will fill vacant positions sooner or later, despite their possible shortcomings (Nevicka et al., 2011). The leadership cultures of the organizations will increasingly become inconducive to diversity and effectiveness over time. Thus, changes in them should be continuously monitored and managed. Human resource specialists working in organizations must ensure that they always have a highly diversified group of leaders. Expecting a homogenous group of leaders to select and empower a diverse group of next-generation leaders is paradoxical (Bebbington and Özbilgin, 2013). The same warning also applies to the degree of homogeneity in leader selection committees, even for the times that these collectives consist only human resource specialists and do not include leaders (Daskalova, 2018, 2019).
• Secondly, organizations should not solely focus their attention and efforts on one part of the big picture of the leadership problems (Allio, 2007). Leadership culture is developed and changed co-constructively. Thus, organizations must prioritize developing better leadership systems and cultures simultaneously while aiming for better leadership (Padilla et al., 2007; Day et al., 2014). Instead of attending only to separate parts of leadership problems, like unequal representation and lack of effectiveness, they should work on improving both individual members and organizational structures (Schein, 2004; Day et al., 2014; Kossek et al., 2017).
• Thirdly, companies must acknowledge that just because they think they have a healthy leadership culture, it does not mean that candidates perceive it similarly (Schein, 2004; Day et al., 2014; Jacobsen and Bøgh Andersen, 2015). Having a conducive leadership culture in terms of diversity and leader effectiveness is not enough; candidates must be perceiving it in the same sense (Schein, 2004; Day et al., 2014). This point is critical. The order of events described in the bottleneck metaphor indicates that sustained diversity in the candidate pools is the primary condition to avoid overly exclusive leadership cultures harming organizations. Organizations should guarantee that the right 678 messages about the leadership culture are broadcast and transmitted. One rogue leader, or some baseless myths and rumors about the group’s leaders and leadership structures, can contort the candidates’ perceptions about the group’s leadership culture in many negative ways (Foster, 2000; Popper, 2012; Day et al., 2014; Popper and Castelnovo, 2018; Wantaate, 2019).
• Governments and other policy-making agencies also have their responsibilities in creating, maintaining, and developing leadership cultures. Policies like quotas can be beneficial to increasing diversity, but to reach their maximum potentials, they should be supported with the right kind of leadership cultures (Pande and Ford, 2011; Bullough and de Luque, 2015; Mölders et al., 2018).
• Change in universal leadership culture can be accomplished most efficiently by changing the current leadership cultures existing at organizational levels.However, an organization’s leadership culture acts as a bottleneck that only allows candidates who perceive themselves and are perceived by others as compatible. Hence, these tend to reproduce themselves and the leadership cultures seen at higher levels. It is possible to change a leadership culture by introducing intentional misalignments between the leadership culture and climate. The most obvious indicators of the leadership culture underlying the leadership climate in an organization are the perceived commonalities among the existing leaders.
• Organizations need to know how different groups of candidates perceive their leadership cultures. They must figure out who is or who is not attracted to their leadership positions. They can use the questionnaires of the available agentic constructs related to leadership emergence to obtain more detailed answers to these questions. Lastly, leadership cultures have their implications for many different actors on various levels. Thus, the multilevel, multi-actor nature of co-construction of change in leadership cultures must not be ignored when theories and interventions are developed