The impact of organisational culture and leadership on
performance improvement in Iraq

Al-Tameemi, KSA; Alshawi, M

Abstract

In 2013, the World Bank ranked Iraq 165 out of 185 countries in its overall “ease of doing business” category. Transparency International ranked Iraq 169 out of 176 in its 2012 Corruption Perception Index (BEBA, 2013). This reflects the poor performance of the public sector organisations responsible for the delivery of the various services in Iraq. By looking at the literature, it is clear that organisational culture and leadership have a significant impact on the performance of organisations. Thus, this makes them important factors that need to be taken into consideration when reforming public sector performance in the developing world. However, there has not been any research that discusses this relationship from the context of the public sector in Iraq. Therefore, this paper aims at expanding the base of knowledge and empirically tests the impact of leadership, people and organisational culture on a public sector organisation’s performance in Iraq.

The study has used a public service “Practices & Performance” Benchmarking tool called PROBE, which stands for PROmoting Business Excellence, to assess the current organisational leadership and people practices of a government organisation and has benchmarked them to best practices of world-class organisations. Interviews have also been conducted, first with the staff members to gain consensus on the assessment results. Then the organisation’s customers (who are mainly contractors) have also been interviewed to understand their level of satisfaction with the current practices of the organisation. The result derived from the interviews accord with the results generated by the PROBE tool. The assessment result has showed how poor leadership and people practices have led to a weak overall organisational performance. This result supports previous studies and confirms the impact of organisational culture, people and leadership on the performance of organisations.

Citation

performance improvement in Iraq. ˜The œbuilt & human environment review, 7, 1-15

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Oct 1, 2014
• Publication Date: Nov 1, 2014
• Deposit Date: Mar 29, 2016
• Publicly Available Date: Apr 5, 2016
• Journal: The Built and Human Environment Review
• Volume: 7
• Pages: 1-15
• Publisher URL: http://www.tbher.org
• Related Public URLs: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/268149837_The_Impact_of_Organisational_Culture_and_Leadership_on_Performance_Improvement_in_Iraq
• Additional Information: Funders : The Built and Human Environment Review