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Introduction
One of the most challenging managerial responsibilities in heterogeneous organizations is handling employee behavior, especially in the absence of a uniform culture from which personnel derive values and commitment. The modern manager in any typical workplace will have to balance environmental, global, workplace, and organizational challenges, which cumulatively rise from the changing dynamics in strategic goal-achievement efforts. Leslie’s managerial experiences at the Greenhill community, although set in the early 1990s, are not different from contemporary challenges that organizational leaders face in their daily duties. Greenhill Community Center, being a multi-service agency in Coastal City, East Coast, had to include diverse staff for the many programs it provides to the public.
Although departmental heads and subordinates are only concerned with their respective departmental success, Leslie’s managerial responsibilities included strategizing overall organizational success. The implication is that Leslie had to be a transformative leader who ensured strategic changes across departments to neutralize behaviors that potentially threatened goal achievement. This paper discusses the role of transformational leadership in managing organizational behavior from a managerial perspective, arguing that transformative leaders can change key dynamics by taking the role of a change agent.
One of the key elements of Leslie’s case was that she took up a new job at a multi-service community center that sat on one of the poorest cities on the East Coast. Not only was the poverty level a major concern on the extent to which organizational resources could be exhausted, but the immigration-refugee influx in the city implied that Greenhill had to take up more cases. Financial muscle was an important factor for any manager overseeing as many as four departments with unique needs and stakeholder expectations. However, Greenhill’s $700 000 budget was funded through unstable revenue sources, from fundraisers, grants, tuition charges, and rental income. A manager running an institution financed by grants or fundraisers has to ensure pragmatism in stakeholder management and a favorable organizational brand image to avoid public controversies.
Each of the four programs offered at Greenhill Community Center served at full capacity, with diversified activities promoting stakeholder well-being across Coastal City. The agency’s music school accommodated 230 students in music and theatre class in addition to private instrument lessons. The school also liaised with the Coastal City community to run intergenerational concern series. Greenhill’s other department runs the Elder Program with over 800 participants, offering various classes and support groups for the elderly. Besides the hot lunch programs and fitness activities, the Elder Program included home repair services. Greenhill also had an Afterschool Program headed by Director Elaine, which served an average of twenty to thirty children a day during the summer. The fourth and critically significant program was the Day Care, which served about 150 children between fifteen months to six years.
Leslie was taking over from the previous Executive Director, who did not value all the departments equally, especially showing disinterest in the Elder Care programs at the institution. Leslie was not fortunate enough to meet the new staff before taking her new position, a challenge that resulted from a long-standing rift between staff and trustees at Greenhill. Staff resentment was common, given the poor communication channels that impact critical information delivery and personnel involvement in key organizational decisions. Moreover, active trustee participation in key corporate meetings was a major challenge since only half or less of the members actively participated in trustee meetings. Leslie’s major task was to change Greenhill Community Center’s managerial approaches from a family-run model to a professional technique, emulating the modern business environment.
Key Issues
Taking Greenhill from a family-run model to modernized leadership paradigms was a key challenge that resulted in Leslie’s frustrations despite her initial enthusiasm when joining the Coastal City agency. Leslie joined an institution that lacked a uniform organizational culture, an integral factor in promoting transformational change in modern workplaces (Al-Ali et al., 2017). Greenhill’s dysfunctional culture was the source of most of the managerial challenges that buffeted Leslie barely a week after taking a new position. The first key issue captured in the case was poor communication between staff and the top management.
There was practically zero staff cohesion at Greenhill since all departmental directors engaged in a virtual competition to make their respective programs outstanding from the rest. Leslie addressed the issue using staff cohesion improvement techniques to engage them in interdepartmental meetings and regular memos to communicate key events. The implications of poor staff cohesion on Leslie’s transformative managerial efforts were that there would never be a uniform organizational change process.
An unprofessional trustee board was a key issue in Leslie’s efforts to improve Greenhill, the rationale being that the members lacked the basic skills necessary to run an annual fundraising program. Leslie noticed that most members were unprofessional, only hiding behind the ad hoc committee sittings during special fundraiser events. Although Leslie left this issue unaddressed, a professionalized board was critically integral in corroborating her transformative efforts, especially on revenue management after fundraiser activities. One of the key areas to transform was funding sources diversification to strengthen the weakly performing areas, like donations.
Hoppmann et al. (2019) stated that a corporate board of directors is the source of inertia in the change process. Compared to the roles performed by trustees in facilitating funds for Greenhill Community Center, there was an urgent need to have the most skilled and professional committee assisting in round-the-clock resource management. The implication of such assistance to Leslie was that she could focus on other key areas that needed urgent addressing, especially organizational diversity issues.
Diversity and inclusion were two key issues at Greenhill, starting from the staff composition to board members’ characteristics. One of Leslie’s top concerns as a transformational leader was that Greenhill’s staff and board member diversity did not reflect the Coast City’s changing demographics. The case captured one critical element of growing immigrant populations, especially from Southeast Asia. The implication of changing demographics is that Greenhill either had clients from other racial identities or had donations from them. Either way, the new key stakeholders had to change from white-majority dominated to a uniformly represented staff or board to reflect the immediate community characteristics.
Tasheva and Hillman (2019) found that diversity integration in organizational management promoted optimized utilization of multilevel human capital, leading to team effectiveness. Therefore, Leslie’s concerns about diversity were founded on key managerial strategies for organizational effectiveness in contemporary business environmental dynamics, although the issue remained unaddressed as per the case.
Major issues resulted from Greenhill’s dysfunctional culture, which affected staff relationships, especially how they understood the respective job roles or their expectations of providing key services to the organization’s stakeholders. The most salient challenge was intra-staff conflicts which impeded collaborative working or support to colleagues. Leslie’s first experience with intra-staff conflicts came when she needed to create additional space for a new half-day toddler program from one of the existing departments.
Poor coordination and understanding among staffers created stiff competition, and no director was willing to accommodate a new program, probably out of fear that new roles would affect departmental performance. The Greenhill staff was change-resistant, implying that the previous executive promoted maintenance of the status quo rather than dynamic changes. Moreover, there were no policy structures for guiding professional conduct among staff, a challenge that became salient when one member was accused of sexual abuse on a young child. Most of Leslie’s efforts to transform Greenhill covered these issues, especially the new communication and staff engagement techniques, in addition to the newly introduced counseling services. Therefore, recommendations on diversity and inclusion, organizational culture formation, and change management through policy introduction should have rectified Greenhill’s erratic staff behavioral patterns.
Recommendations
Organizational Culture
The highly recommended managerial duty that the new Executive Director should have considered was forming a new organizational culture that reflected the core principles and strategic goals. Leslie needed an uncompromising culture with clearly outlined values on integrity and behavioral expectations. Mullakhmetov et al. (2019) observed that uncompromising cultures rewarded employees who met behavioral expectations while punishing those who deviated. Lisa’s approach to organizational effectiveness should have entailed a tight grip on internal governance duties before extending the transformative principles to external stakeholders.
Daneshmandnia (2019) observed that positive organizational values supported by a uniform culture promoted result-oriented competition that contributed to a general health workplace environment and personnel well-being. Key values that should have been incorporated into Greenhill’s new culture are equality, mutual respect, increased focus on trust and organizational growth, and an enhanced servant purpose.
Organizational culture changes generate strong influential forces that transform employee commitment to goal achievement. Mullakhmetov et al. (2019) observed that positive cultural values serve not only the leader but also the staff body, which is also an integral part of the organization. Cultural positivity is a functional extension of managerial responsibilities because a servant-purpose influences personnel commitment to quality improvement in key areas such as service provision, customer relationships, and general community service (Mullakhmetov et al., 2019).
Trust and validation values in Greenhill’s organizational culture could have solved intra-staff conflicts and great staff resentment over ambiguous fundraising activities. The implication of organizational culture on strategic workplace transformation is that members become part of the change process. Moreover, Leslie’s organization could have benefitted from innovative strategic initiatives if the organization focused on growth and transformative changes for service improvement. One possible challenge with organizational culture transformations was staff turnover for those who could not manage the culture shock.
Diversity and Inclusion
Diversity and inclusion are the two highly recommended changes that should have transformed Greenhill’s cultural effectiveness, especially by actualizing Leslie’s dreams for holistic organizational transformation. Leslie observed a huge deficit in the representation of the Coastal City’s demographic population in Greenhill staff or board composition. Bernstein et al. (2020) observed that diversity and inclusion facilitate practically implementing the theory of generative interactions in any organization. The theory suggests that personnel must overcome exclusionary dynamics to achieve organizational effectiveness (Bernstein et al., 2020).
A practical example of the generative interactions theory implementation at Greenhill would have entailed improvements in communication and staff engagement, dismantling self-segregation among program directors, and discouraging stereotyping or stigmatization of staff members. Moreover, diversity and inclusion could have produced different outcomes in collaborative support for the staff member accused of sexual assault. The implications of diversity and inclusion for Greenhill could have been innovative growth, a positive organizational culture, and improved productivity.
Policy Changes and Change Management
Recommendations for incremental change management should have transformed the Greenhill workplace environment to address diversity and inclusion issues, organizational culture needs, and general workplace planning for strategic goal achievement. A viable technique Leslie should have used to manage incremental changes was policy transformations outlining employee behavioral expectations on key performance areas. According to Dwiningwarni et al. (2022), pairing policy changes with change management improves employee participation, where the responsible change agents must convince members to join the new organizational transformations. A critical tool that should have been used in the Greenhill management change and policy transformation processes is Kotter’s 8-Step Model for identifying opportunities and developing a shared vision among staff (Laig & Abocejo, 2021).
The basic procedure for implementing Kotter’s 8-Step Model is that Leslie should have created a sense of urgency for wanted changes, formed a powerful coalition with like-minded change agents, the created the vision for desired changes.
Although the Executive Director should have collaborated with the company board in creating visions for change, the practical transformation begins at the fourth step, which entails communicating the newly visualized strategies. According to Laig and Abocejo (2021), the principal change agent must ensure frequent communication about the new visions. Leslie’s transformative communication strategies would have made it easier to inform members of the upcoming changes, either through written memos or during staff and board meetings. However, the most salient change process entails removing obstacles, which entailed challenging change complacency in Leslie’s case.
Dwinigrwarni et al. (2022) suggested that the principal change agent should identify skeptics and convince them of the implications of intended transformations. Kotter’s sixth step entails creating short-term wins, a motivational strategy for convincing members that transformations work. Leslie should have also built on the change by ensuring consistency, then anchored the change in organizational culture to corroborate other cultural transformations in previous efforts.
Conclusion
Managers transform organizational dynamics by acting as transformative change agents who reform poorly performing sectors while introducing new strategies for boosting performance effectiveness. A manager must be a strategic visionary who views the organizational environment differently than everyone else. Leslie’s case practically supported the idea of integrating visionary leadership in organizational management because she was responsible for diagnosing shortcomings that impacted Greenhill’s multi-service effectiveness. Practical examples are the Executive Director’s visions for diversity and inclusion, policy implementation on employee behavioral expectations, and a professionalized trustee committee for improved fundraiser outcomes. Most of the challenges at Greenhill are tests for refining an executive’s managerial effectiveness because strategic transformations raise the competency levels for similar tasks.
Although Leslie changed several approaches to organizational management at Greenhill, she left a few areas uncovered. Recommended changes to managerial techniques in Leslie’s organization include organizational culture formation, improvements in diversity and inclusion initiatives, and incremental policy transformation to set the change inertia. Kotter’s 8-Step Model is a reliable tool that should have helped Leslie at Greenhill, given the tool’s comprehensive coverage of expected change outcomes in any practical organization. The tool has strategies for overcoming change resistance and making change part of the corporate culture, two ideas that could have saved Leslie from her frustrations. The key observation on the case analysis using scholarly evidence is that transformational leadership is useful for effective change management, especially by influencing culture uniformity and vision sharing.
References
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Tasheva, S., & Hillman, A. J. (2019). Integrating diversity at different levels: Multilevel human capital, social capital, and demographic diversity and their implications for team effectiveness. Academy of Management Review, 44(4), 746-765. Web.
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