Leadership, organizational culture and performance: a cross-cultural aspect of non-profit organization management

This thesis is aimed to examine the relationships between leadership, organizational culture and performance in the context of non-profit organization management. The context of non-profit organizations is specifically worth attention because these organizations have to adopt different attitude to their stakeholders and different organizational strategies, compared to the corporate organizations. That makes the question of authentic guidance, and strong organizational culture even more important for non-profit organizations. The research was applied to international non-profit organization called AIESEC, and conducted in the international ambience, involving participants from Portugal and Ukraine. AIESEC is an international non-profit organization run by students and recent graduates with the main focus on international exchange, world issues, leadership and management. Portugal and Ukraine were chosen as main countries involved in this study, as the researcher worked in AIESEC in both countries and was familiar with the reality of organization in those countries. It was hypothesized that organizational performance in non-profit organizations is influenced by leadership and organizational culture, also that culture is a mediator in this relationship. Besides that, this is study was called to reveal the nature of leadership and of current and ideal organizational cultures in AIESEC in Ukraine and Portugal. The questionnaire was sent to participants via e-mail. 252 responses were received, however, 12 of these responses were ineligible due to several reasons: participants did not understand the guidelines for the questionnaires or did not speak English fluently enough. Authentic Leadership Questionnaire (ALQ) by Avolio and Walumbwa (2007) was used to assess the leadership perception. Participants were asked to think about their team leader and judge how frequently each statement fits his or her leadership style by responding to a 16 item questionnaire. For organizational culture the questionnaire developed by Cameron and Quinn (2000) with four types of organizational culture (Clan, Hierarchy, Market and Adhocracy) was selected. Cameron and Quinn’s OCAI was used to assess how participants perceive the current organizational culture compared to the preferred one. Participants were asked to assess six key dimensions of organizational culture, providing a picture of how, in participants’ point of view, the organization operates and what values characterize it. Participants were to rate their organization by responding to six questions and distributing 100 by the four alternatives proposed to assess the current and the preferred organizational culture. As for the organizational performance, the 5-factor scale, retrieved from Ogbonna and Harris (2000) was used to assess how participants estimate the organizational performance in terms of customer satisfaction, sales growth, market share, competitive advantage and sales volume. The participants were asked to estimate each of the above-mentioned factors on the 0 to 100 scale. The measurers selected for this research are considered reliable as Cronbach’s alpha coefficient for overall model was over high as well as for each variable separately. Good results received allows us to say that the study satisfies the validity criteria. Participants of this study were 240 students-members of AIESEC organization, divided into two groups according to the country of origin, 120 members of AIESEC in Ukraine and 120 of AIESEC in Portugal. The participants were students of different universities of Ukraine and Portugal and from different cities of Ukraine and Portugal, aged from 19 to 26 years old. The data was analyzed using SPSS program 21.0 version and AMOS program 22.0 version. SPSS was used for descriptive statistics, validity and reliability check, exploratory factor analysis and correlation analysis. AMOS program was used during path analysis when building a research model. The hypothesis based on Obgonnad and Harris’ (2000) study was confirmed, meaning that it was found that in non-profit organizations, leadership and organizational culture influence the performance, with organizational culture being the mediator of relationship between two phenomena. The hypotheses stating the differences between leadership style and organizational culture in AIESEC in Ukraine were confirmed as well, as findings state that transparent leadership style is more videspread in non-profit organizations in Portugal than in Ukraine. This research proved that non-profit organizations in Ukraine, namely AIESEC, tend to have Market and Hierarchy types of current organizationla cultures, while non-profit organizations in Portugal are more likely to operater within Clan and Adhocracy current organizational culture. The expectations of ideal organizational culture of Portuguese and Ukrainian respondents corresponded with the current culture in organizations, meaning that non-profit organization members in Portugal see the Clan culture as ideal, while Ukrainian participants see it a Hierarchy type. This thesis is unique is its way as it’s the first one to combine three concepts of leadership, organizational culture and performance with the research conducted in non-profit organizations and that counts in the involvement of participants from different countries. The main limitation of the current study is the concordance between number of variables and sample size. The sample of 240 respondents is quite usual for a psychological research, however, the present study contained 69 variables included in the analysis. For this large amount of variables the sample should have included circa 700 participants. This limitation was partly solved by computing the variables. Another limitation of the study is the language level. Participants received the questionnaire in English, while none of them was a native English speaker. The implication for a future research here would be using Portuguese and Ukrainian versions of the questionnaires or selecting a sample from English-speaking countries, like the UK, the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The next limitation of this study was the form how the questionnaire was presented to participants. The questionnaire was e-mailed to the respondents, and they had to send it back when it’s complete. The direct interaction and support to participants from a researcher could improve the reliability results. The future research can also include other measures of leadership, organizational culture and performance, having two different measure for each construct would be helpful as well as it would provide a more transparent understanding of the measured phenomena. The study was able to provide cultural diversity of the results, as the research was conducted on Portuguese and Ukrainian sample. The future research can include other countries in the analysis to see a broader perspective of organizational culture, performance and leadership in non-profit organizations. Keywords: leadership, organizational culture, organizational performance, non-profit organizations, Portuguese organizational culture, Ukrainian organizational culture, Clan, Adhocracy, Hierarchy and Market culture.

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