Cultural Hierarchies, Leadership, and Employee Happiness

Positive workplace cultures prioritize employees’ health and well-being, encourage respect and trust among all, and forgive mistakes. They promote employee happiness and retention, improve team performance, and enhance talent while effective leadership enables engineering managers to capture the full potential of employees’ skills and knowledge. Previous research demonstrates that happier employees are more engaged and productive. This article proposes a conceptual model of culture from the perspective of organizational leadership theory. In particular, the model is derived from a longitudinal study of complexity leadership and represents culture at three scales: societal (macro), organizational (meso), and team (micro). At each level, culture is conceived as a set of actively promoted or discouraged behaviors, what might be called active culture. We also propose that employee happiness is largely influenced by the form and interplay of leadership and these layered cultures. Our aim is to provide practical implications for engineering managers wanting to develop business or team culture, leadership, and employee happiness while seeking to promote productivity and engagement.


I. INTRODUCTION
A POSITIVE workplace culture has always been an important factor for the success of an organization as it helps boost engagement and employee happiness, thus leading to increased talent retention and productivity. Historically, we have heard stories where a specific business culture is held up as the foundation of business success [1], [2]. Successful organizations may sometimes be described as having a culture of innovation, of collaboration or some other positive attribute, and no business wants to be described as having a "toxic culture" [3], [4], [5], [6]. Employee happiness is a recent concept used to define a subjective perception in employees, which relates to personal well-being and organizational efforts. It has been described as a state of mind in which the feeling of accomplishment, personal validation, and compensation are balanced with the workload, leadership style, and level of responsibilities [7], [8].
In the mid of the recent "Great Resignation" [4] and the viral trend of "Quiet Quitting" (i.e., employees reducing their devotion to their job), the link between culture, happiness, and success seems more evident than ever. It is proposed that these considerations fall under the scope of complexity leadership (leading in a nondeterministic environment) as factoring culture and employee happiness into a leadership model requires a recognition of the complex nature of organizational environments. The closer you look at culture as a complex system, the more detail, layers, and complex interactions are revealed.
Discussions on the effects of culture on organizations are wide-ranging and contain several common themes.
While some existing literature are focused on either national culture [9], [10], [11], [12] or business culture [13], [14], [15], [16], other studies describe hierarchies of cultures and subcultures [17], [18]. This article examines how culture affects and resides within organizations from the perspective of leadership and the subsequent happiness of employees. By using the concept of active culture, behaviors which a culture either rewards or punishes, a simplified and pragmatic model of culture is proposed.

II. KEY CONCEPTS
A. Culture at Different Scales It is common to discuss culture in the context of cultural groups and subgroups. For instance, we often speak of national, regional, religious, generational, organizational, and team cultures and, logically, we understand at some level that this array of cultures comes together in some form of interplay within any diverse group. It is also understood that, over time, a newly formed group may develop its own culture through habits, practices, attitudes, and assumptions. Such behaviors give the group a sense of identity and unity and provides structure to their social interactions. Clearly, accounting for every nuance in culture or superculture (i.e., a blend of cultures into a larger culture) is impractical. At the same time, culture must somehow be conceptually modeled for practical reasons.
The proposed cultural model, as shown in Figure 1, provides sufficient fidelity for the purposes of complexity leadership. In the model, the active elements of the societal culture influence and constrain the organizational culture, which influences and constrains the team culture. Each culture imposes expectations upon the layer below and, rather than defining it, creates a cultural environment for the subculture. Each cultural layer can be very different in nature and will be generated from a unique history and the agenda of dominant factions, such as leaders or environmental influences. Ultimately, those who decide what is rewarded and what is discouraged will dictate the active cultural drivers. The more effective the influencers are within the supergroup, the greater the active cultural effects.

1) Societal Culture (Macro):
Whether restricted to a local region or working across many nations, an organization physically operates in and draws employees and customers from a society or macroculture. This society could be a monoculture or possibly a superculture. The stronger the influence of a dominant mindset within this society, the more likely it is that cultural expectations will be imposed upon the organization in the form of positive or negative actions. In a cosmopolitan society, there may potentially be less prescribed behaviors, although cosmopolitanism can act as its own culture [19], whereas monocultures, with strong traditions, may form a challenging operating environment for outsiders [9], [11].
These societal cultural expectations create some strongly active boundaries (discouraged behaviors) and drivers (rewarded behaviors), which collectively should be seen as defining the minimum level of cultural awareness needed to operate effectively within that society. These active cultural expectations may be rebelled against, but doing so should be a conscious strategic decision rather than the result of cultural ignorance. For example, operating in a rigidly ethical way in a society where there is a culture of corruption [9] may be a sound business strategy, but will need determined persistence and support to be successful. Understanding traditional social rules (such as the Chinese idea of "face") may be necessary to avoid offense or confusion [11] but, as a foreign organization operating in China, you may find complete adherence to such a complex social ruleset challenging.

2) Organizational Culture (MESO):
You might expect an organization's culture to be wholly within its control. Certainly, societal culture will not define the cultural form or ethos of an organization, but the organization needs to recruit from and operate within the society. This can lead to constraints or biases. When the active cultural constraints are ignored or consciously rebelled against, there is a risk of the organization being boycotted [20] by customers and potential future employees. An example of a specific type of boycotting has been described as "cancel culture" [21]. Within this culture, previously successful individuals who, as part of their business or career use social media as a platform, are boycotted, ostracized, or shunned ("cancelled") by their audience for cultural infractions (real or perceived).
By reducing the societal culture to its active culture (i.e., what is promoted and what is discouraged), an organization can avoid key cultural pitfalls and potentially reap the rewards of societal bias.

3) Team Culture (Micro):
It is proposed that a team's culture is formed from a mixture of factors. The work itself may require certain behaviors from team members. Teams operating in adverse conditions may develop a strong sense of camaraderie and team identity as a coping strategy. Transient teams may find a neutral, professional demeanor most efficient. Whatever the team's circumstances, any team culture that arises is likely to be unique and strongly dependent on circumstance and history.
Where a team's culture is counterproductive to the aims (and perhaps culture) of the organization, active steps may be taken to modify the culture of the team. Again, the question of what is promoted and what is discouraged comes to the fore, and managers can manipulate the team's culture by consistently applying a set of new rules on behavior.
A team which has developed a strong individual culture may struggle to adapt to changes that challenge that culture. Merging with another team, a change of leadership, a large influx of new people, or changes in the wider operating environment can be destabilizing and may lead to unhappiness [22].

4) Employee Happiness:
Happiness in the labor environment is not a commonly discussed topic. Technology and engineering managers must understand that their team's perception of work is influenced by societal, organizational, and team cultures. Concepts such as religion, work assignment, marital status, and many others are variables of influence that help to define how relevant employee happiness is in the productive process outcome. The challenge of understanding this correlation is significant (as the relationships are complex in nature), but this understanding is critical for the development of leadership strategies, especially for technologybased managers [23], [24].

III. IMPLICATIONS FOR TECHNOLOGY AND ENGINEERING MANAGERS
To be effective, a manager or leader must understand the active cultural environment in which they operate. This is particularly important in times of organizational change as this is when cultural dissonance or conflict are most likely to occur. For leaders operating at an organizational level, an understanding of the relationship between the active culture of society is an important consideration when defining or modifying the organizational culture. When seeking to understand an existing culture, searching for the active cultural elements (what is actively promoted or discouraged) will give a truer picture than looking at artifacts like mission statements, policies, and mottos. For new team leaders, an appraisal of the existing team culture and levels of happiness should give insight to where adjustments need to be made. Again, by modifying the active cultural drivers, cultural change can be enacted. A collaborative and empowering management style combined with a culture of teamwork and openness can provide the foundation of an effective and happy team culture. By rewarding positive behaviors and punishing negative behaviors, the culture can be rapidly redefined.

IV. PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS
Most organizations operate within a superculture, which changes with time and behaves as a complex system. Modeling such a system in detail is not practical, but a pragmatic approach to modelling culture is proposed, which reduces the superculture to an active culture comprising behaviors, which are either actively discouraged or rewarded. This active culture is modeled as having three layers from an organizational perspective: societal, organizational, and team. It is proposed that active cultural elements, in one layer, constrain and influence the development of the culture in the layers below. In this way, the societal culture influences and constrains both the organizational and team cultures unless there is active rebellion. In practice, the implementation of this conceptual model requires managers to recognize multilevel complex cultural influences when defining the active culture of the organization. The cultural objective is to promote employees' wellbeing, and at the same time, to fulfill organizational goals in the medium and long term.
Employee happiness links to the idea of active culture in several ways. Great contentment and even happiness can be gained when benefiting from the rewards of a culture. When individuals need to adapt to a new or modified cultural environment, they are likely to find their previously encouraged behavior no longer fits cultural expectations and is no longer rewarded. If, however, the new culture is more closely aligned to their own patterns of behavior, or if the new culture brings them greater levels of success, an increase in happiness may result. In technology and engineering organizations, this requires leaders to engage in leadership actions which encourage the organization to focus on employeesbeliefs, wants, and expectations of a balanced work-life and family or personal time. Ultimately, an organization which is sensitive to the cultural environment and the interplay between employee happiness and culture is likely to be more effective than one which is ignorant of them.

V. CONCLUSION
In this article, a conceptual model of culture from the perspective of organizational leadership theory is proposed, where culture is represented at three scales. Additionally, we have proposed that employee happiness is largely influenced by the form and interplay of leadership and these layered cultures. In so doing, we provide practical implications for managers wanting to develop business or team culture, leadership, and employee happiness, while seeking to promote productivity and engagement.