Managing and Leading Nonprofit Organizations

4Creating Positive Organizational Culture

A Well‐Kept Secret

Psst, come here … I want to share something with you. Something that will help you advance your leadership and help your organization fulfill its mission. Now, remember the term identified earlier in this book, the word simplexity? Well, what we explore in this chapter is a perfect example of simplexity. More specifically we explore something that is simultaneously simple and complex. The idea is simple yet the layers that exist and the strategies to advance this important conceptual frame can be complex, while also simple—simplexity for sure.

For decades, researchers, writers, and practitioners in leadership, management, and organizational science have recognized the importance of organizational culture. Peter Drucker is attributed with saying that if you are not careful, your organization's culture will eat your strategy for breakfast. A recent Google search of the phrase “organizational culture” nets more than 190,000,000 results in less than a second. Researchers strive to understand organizational culture from all perspectives. Virgana and Kasyadi (2020), for example, studied the role that organizational culture plays in school supervisor performance. Marcos, García‐Ael, and Topa (2020) studied the impact of organizational culture on the citizenship behavior of Spanish police officers. Aryani and Widodo (2020) conducted an extensive literature review to build a conceptual framework for understanding successful ...