Organizational leadership as a factor of building corporate culture and performance

Abstract

Organizations encounter the challenge of lacking leadership development pipelines and changing demographics in the workplace. The paper aims to review literature on leadership and its relationship with organizational culture and motivate organizations to embark on change initiatives to continually improve their occupational health and safety (OHS) operations. The key objectives are helping organizations understand the relationship between leadership and OHS performance and how cultural values help connect the dot between them, putting leadership styles into context by focusing on internal factors that impact on an organization, highlighting the development trend of OHS risk management industry throughout the discussion, focusing on some practical guideline on implementing OHS improvement initiatives, introducing the correlation between leading and lagging indicators as a measure of the effectiveness of leadership in enhancing OHS performance. The study develops a framework of operation transmission mechanism that embraces an OHS management system (OHSMS), describes the delivery of cultural value and the impact on workers’ behavior. The outcome of this applied research presents industry good practices that are field tested expertise and guides organizations implement an OHSMS that facilitates organizational leaders to deliver cultural values with appropriate leadership style and organizational health. The OHSMS encompasses, amongst others, policy, process, procedure, standards and techniques. And the design of such a management system is recommended for future research.