Paths to Success: Leveraging Culture, Leadership, and Learning Strategies

Introduction

Organizations necessarily need to redefine their behavior in order to nurture competitive advantage within the fluctuating external environments. This behavior requires organizations to be more decisive and proactive with regard to stakeholders especially, clients and competitors, as well as to adopt a new management paradigm. In this way, client satisfaction, scanning the competitive environment (Senge, 1990) revisiting ethically driven values and implementing an innovative culture within the organization, are all sources of inspiration which help to sustain creativity and organizational innovation. Nowadays, organizational sustainability and longevity are threatened by the external environments which become ever more turbulent and unpredictable as the economic globalization evolves. However, this process can be slowed down or reduced by adopting entrepreneurial behaviors that are more decisive, such as, responding carefully to clients as well as to competitors (Morgan & Hunt, 1994). Nevertheless, on the whole, companies tend to ignore the importance of paying attention to specific stakeholders and fail to see economic and social value (Fry, 2003) in general. This chapter highlights a shift in paradigm, namely from the classical approach to the knowledge management (KM) paradigm. The aim of this chapter is to show the importance of intangible resources as a source of creating sustainable value through knowledge (Carter & Scarbourough, 2001). The constructs of leadership and leaders’ self-efficacy in organizations demonstrate their influence on organizational cross-cultural efforts. The ensuing effect arises from the linkage between organizational performance and efficiency with leadership self-efficacy. Studies on both leadership self-efficacy and leader efficacy measure leadership self-efficacy as specifically focusing on the capacity of leaders to lead change efforts (Paglis & Green, 2002). It is our intent to shed light on the importance of new knowledge arising from the paradigm shift of organizational values wherein intangibles lie.This chapter is divided into the following sections, introduction, the theoretical framework as a nexus of the shift in paradigms to emphasize the importance of leadership, culture, learning and knowledge. This framework further highlights the inimitable nature of intangible values that are distinguishing elements in organizational performance and sustainability. Conclusions, reflections and recommendations for future research are set forth.