Leadership and Organizational Climate

Leadership and Organizational Climate is a book that shows how leaders impact organizational performance by manipulating the environmental determinants of motivation. Consciously or unconsciously, effective leaders arouse and direct the motivational energy that compels people to action. This book explains how specific leadership practices shape the dimensions of organizational climate and how different climates influence people's energies and efforts. Stringer discusses both the direct and indirect aspects of leadership: how the “memory” or “shadow” of a leader creates a certain atmosphere or climate within an organization, and how this climate impacts motivation. Leadership is too often explained in terms of the leader's direct face-to-face impact on people. This book describes and validates the less dramatic but more lasting impact that certain leadership practices have on people's thoughts, feelings, and behavior. Filled with examples showing how leaders can manage performance by using organizational climate, this book attempts to be a “cloud chamber” for the practice of leadership—it traces the normally unseen, but very real, motivational influences that leaders exert when they move through an organization. For individuals looking for tools they can immediately use to improve their leadership effectiveness and organizational performance.

Robert A. Stringer Jr. is a partner with Mercer Delta Consulting LLC, which consults to CEOs and senior executives of major corporations on the design and leadership of large-scale change. He works primarily in the areas of organizational effectiveness and executive leadership development.

For the past twenty-five years, Robert Stringer has designed and implemented business strategy and executive education programs in the United States and abroad. His assignments included projects with Bank of America, General Electric, Imperial Chemicals, Inc., PepsiCo, General Mills, Fidelity Investments, HSBC, AT&T, Gillette, Xerox, Prudential, and Citibank.

In addition to Leadership and Organizational Climate: The Cloud Chamber Effect, Mr. Stringer has coauthored three other books: Motivation and Organizational Climate with George H. Litwin, Men in Management with J.B. Kassarjian, and Strategy Traps and How to Avoid Them with Joel Uchenick. He received a B.A. with honors from Harvard College and an M.B.A. degree with distinction from Harvard Business School. He also taught on the faculty of the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, spending .part of that tenure teaching in the Philippines.