Employees’ Experiences of Leadership Strategies and Organizational Culture

Organizational culture plays a crucial role in determining organizational effectiveness and long-term performance. Leadership is widely recognized as a key factor in shaping organizational values, employee behavior, and workplace dynamics. This study aims to examine how leadership strategies influence organizational culture within workplace organizations and also to identify the contextual and relational mechanisms—including instances of inconsistency between leadership rhetoric and practice—through which these strategies are enacted. A qualitative approach was employed, using semi-structured interviews with twelve purposively sampled employees from service, education, and administrative organizations in Indonesia, each with a minimum of six months’ tenure and direct interaction with organizational leaders. Data were analyzed using the six-phase thematic analysis procedure of Braun and Clarke (2022), supported by member checking, peer debriefing with an independent second coder, and an audit trail to strengthen trustworthiness. The findings indicate that leadership strategies significantly influence the development of organizational culture. Leadership behaviors that emphasize effective communication, employee empowerment, and participative decision-making were found to strengthen trust, collaboration, and shared organizational values among employees. In addition, supportive leadership practices contribute to the creation of a more inclusive and motivating workplace environment. At the same time, two negative cases revealed that inconsistent and discontinuous leadership can produce organizational silence and weaken employees’ internalization of organizational values, underscoring consistency and continuity as necessary, rather than optional, conditions for culture-building leadership. These findings highlight the importance of leadership effectiveness in fostering positive organizational cultures that support employee engagement and collaboration. By grounding communication, participation, support, and value-modeling in employees’ own words, including disconfirming accounts, this study offers a context-sensitive, mechanism-based account of how leadership strategies shape organizational culture in everyday practice, with practical implications for leadership development in workplace organizations.