Leadership and emerging cultural patterns in a new television station

This longitudinal case study explores cultural patterns in a new British television company, tracking it from its inception into its third year. Qualitative research methods provide evidence to suggest that despite formal leaders’ intentions to achieve control and consensus, organisation members produce their own, diverse interpretations of leaders’ deliberate (and unintentional) messages. By drawing on inherited expectations and professional associations, members construct their own cultural worlds. Yet, the same professional norms and associations, which the literature suggests are salient in all media organisations, also provide legitimacy for individual leaders’ actions and therefore reinforce their cultural integrating role. Therefore, it is suggested that although organisation members are active in shaping culture, leaders of new media organisations of this nature are significant as sources of cultural cohesion, division and ambiguity, and thus they are influential in encouraging the formation of complex cultural patterns.