Founder Leaders and Organization Culture: A Comparative Study on Indian and American Founder Leaders Based on Schein’s Model of Organizational Culture

Abstract

Organizational culture is created gradually by founder leaders on the basis of their values, assumptions and beliefs. Organizational culture is tangible in terms of the architecture of the company, office layout and exhibits and intangible in terms of behaviour of employees, decisions, policies and procedures. This article aims to perform a comparative analysis of some of the founder leaders of Indian and American businesses and their influence on the culture of the organization. The study adopts the case method research design where the focus is on the specific interesting cases, articles and interviews of the founder(s) in their formational years and cases when the company had a stable organizational culture. The unit of analysis is the founder leader. The company’s culture is evaluated using Schein’s Model of Organizational Culture while that of the founder leader is evaluated using Hofstede’s model of cultural dimensions. This study does not equate national culture to individual’s culture to avoid ecological fallacy of interpreting country-level relationships being applied to individuals. The study shows that there exist layers of subcultures in each individual. The article discusses an interesting paradigm, that is, the culture in which they are born/trained and the culture they adopt intentionally. When founders adopt other cultures, some traces of adopted cultures are reflected in the organization. The article concludes that founder leaders’ culture needs a better framework in order to see its effects on the organization. Hofstede’s model does not show the relationship between different layers of the culture. Hence, the model seems inadequate to be applied to analyse founder leaders.