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Abstract
The originality of the paper lies in the treatment of organizational culture as a dynamic system whose current state and evolution is dictated by a web of influences resulting not only from various organizational aspects (e.g, organizational constitution, adoption of IT&C, motivation etc.), but, most importantly, from the specific type of leadership adopted by key decision-making actors. The G. VALI model which is described in the paper is founded on Social Systems science and General Systems Theory. This approach of the interrelations between leadership and organizational culture is fairly different from past attempts which have placed particular emphasis on the static assessment of organizational culture and leadership. The G.VALI model, which was validated based on data collected from five Romanian SMEs, provides researchers with a means to test the empirically proven fact that organizational cultures evolve even in the absence of specific interventions for change, an aspect which until recently has not been recognized by other theoretical models.
Keywords: leadership; organizational culture; causal loop modeling; systems dynamics.
1.Introduction
Every organization, city, economy or country behaves as a complex (more or less) adaptive social system whose behaviour is dictated not only by the interactions between its constitutive elements, but also by its interactions with its environment. More often than one would think, causes and effects are not obviously connected, but remote in time and space, their multitude hindering the best understanding and resolution of organizational issues (Forrester, 1968; Forrester, 1999; Ackoff, 1971; Senge, 1999; Mitleton-Kelly, 2003). The continuous interactions among the parts of social systems and their nonlinear interdependence functions hamper even more the intuitive judgement. Hence the recommendation for computer simulations which enable researchers to compress or expand time spans and to run the models backwards and forwards in order to facilitate the analysis of the behaviour of the system (Hanneman, 1988; Sterman, 1989).
If organizational dynamics look rather difficult and even controversial to model and simulate, the validation of potential models raises even more disagreements among researchers. Most scholars argue that it is essential to test models by means of statistical methods and data, whereas the advocates of Complexity Theory and General Systems Theory question the possibility of dissociating among the multitude of causes triggering one single effect, and of accurately measuring...