The cultural management of leadership

Abstract

The purpose of this essay is to analyse leadership from a symbolic point of view, as a decisive action for the construction and management of the meanings and values on which all organizational practice is based. A cultural perspective is valuable in understanding how everything that happens within the organization as a whole tends to be permeated by its culture and, therefore, has to be considered in the framework of cultural data. Moreover, such perspective reveals how the culture of an organization cannot be pre-existent to its actors who are the ones who construct it in their interactions over time. In this sense, the themes of leadership and culture are so closely related that they represent the two faces of a coin. Leadership, therefore, should be regarded as a symbolic action. If it is true that every firm has its own culture intended as the power of a group, then it is the leader who actually constructs and manages it in a sort of "cultural management", involving the skills of reading, interpreting and making the organizational culture operative. Furthermore, the question of the double nature of leadership is still open in the theoretical debate, where it is considered as innate talents on the one hand, and as an acquired skill on the other.