Leadership Styles

TOPIC: "Leadership styles in different cultures"

International Organisational Behaviour

3000 words

Due Date: 18 April 2013

Abstract

There is so much rich and varied literature on culture and leadership as separate studies. From around 1997, researchers have focused more on the relationship between these two literatures exploring how leadership styles vary across the globe, and to examine if there are similarities of leadership styles in certain clusters of cultures or countries, or is there a single transcending leadership style across cultures. A significant turning point in cultural studies was Hofstede's cultural dimensions framework (SAGE, 1980) and since then many researchers have conducted studies on cross-cultural leadership - one of largest of them being Project GLOBE (Javidan and House, 2002).

This paper will review literature in cross-cultural leadership styles using a number of prominent empirical studies. The paper will focus on "leadership styles in different cultures" as well as transcending leadership styles across the globe.

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Introduction

Are leadership styles in different cultures different? Is there a transcending global leadership style? While there are many definitions of culture and leadership as separate areas, there is no one consensual agreement of definition for cross-cultural leadership. The two words culture and leadership definitely seem to share a common theme (Akiga and Lowe 2012; Bartol, et al., 1995).

Hofstede (1980) defined culture as "the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one human group from another." To understand leadership in different cultures, and to understand the cultural differences, one might study culture through identification of cultural dimensions. As a result, a number of different cultural dimensions have been developed (Dickson, Hartog, and...