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16.1 Description

As the title suggests, this chapter is about culture and leadership. Like the previous chapter , this one is multifaceted and focuses on a collection of related ideas rather than on a single unified theory. Our discussion in this chapter will center on research that describes culture, its dimensions, and the effects of culture on the leadership process.

Since World War II, globalization has been advancing throughout the world. Globalization is the increased interdependence (economic, social, technical, and political) between nations. There is more international trade, cultural exchange, and use of worldwide telecommunication systems. People are becoming more interconnected, and in the age of the Internet and apps such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat, they can communicate across cultures at the push of a button. Increased globalization has created many challenges, including the need to design effective multinational organizations, to identify and select appropriate leaders for these entities, and to manage and communicate within organizations with culturally diverse employees (House & Javidan, 2004; Lo, Waters, & Christensen, 2017). Globalization has created a need to understand how cultural differences affect leadership performance.

Adler and Bartholomew (1992) contended that global leaders need to develop five cross-cultural competencies: First, leaders need to understand business, political, and cultural environments worldwide. Second, they need to learn the perspectives, tastes, trends, and technologies of many other cultures. Third, they need to be able to work simultaneously with people from many cultures. Fourth, leaders must be able to adapt to living and communicating in other cultures. Fifth, they need to learn to relate to people from other cultures from a position of equality rather than cultural superiority (Adler & Bartholomew, 1992, p. 53). Additionally, Ting-Toomey (1999) said that global leaders need to be skilled in creating transcultural visions. They need to develop communication competencies that will enable them to articulate and implement their vision in a diverse workplace. In sum, today’s leaders need to acquire a challenging set of competencies if they intend to be effective in present-day global societies.

Culture Defined

Anthropologists, sociologists, and many others have debated the meaning of the word culture. Because it is an abstract term, it is hard to define, and different people often define it in dissimilar ways. For our purposes, culture is defined as the learned beliefs, values, rules, norms, symbols, and traditions that are common to a group of people. It is these shared qualities of a group that make them unique. Culture is dynamic and transmitted to others. In short, culture is the way of life, customs, and script of a group of people (Gudykunst & Ting-Toomey, 1988).

Related to culture are the terms multicultural and diversity. Multicultural implies an approach or a system that takes more than one culture into account. It refers to the existence of multiple cultures such as African, American, Asian, European, and Middle Eastern. Multicultural can also refer to a set of subcultures defined by race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or age. Diversity refers to the existence of different cultures or ethnicities within a group or an organization.

Related Concepts

Before beginning our discussion of the various facets of culture, this section describes two concepts that are closely related to culture and leadership: ethnocentrism and prejudice. Both of these concepts can have impacts on how leaders influence others.

Ethnocentrism

As the word suggests, ethnocentrism is the tendency for individuals to place their own group (ethnic, racial, or cultural) at the center of their observations of others and the world. People tend to give priority and value to their own beliefs, attitudes, and values, over and above those of other groups. Ethnocentrism is the perception that one’s own culture is better or more natural than the culture of others. It may include the failure to recognize the unique perspectives of others. Ethnocentrism is a universal tendency, and each of us is ethnocentric to some degree.

Ethnocentrism is like a perceptual window through which people from one culture make subjective or critical evaluations of people from another culture (Porter & Samovar, 1997). For example, some Americans think that the democratic principles of the United States are superior to the political beliefs of other cultures; they often fail to understand the complexities of other cultures. Ethnocentrism accounts for our tendency to think our own cultural values and ways of doing things are right and natural (Gudykunst & Kim, 1997).

Ethnocentrism can be a major obstacle to effective leadership because it prevents people from fully understanding or respecting the viewpoints of others. For example, if one person’s culture values individual achievement, it may be difficult for that person to understand another person whose culture emphasizes collectivity (i.e., people working together as a whole). Similarly, if one person believes strongly in respecting authority, that person may find it difficult to understand someone who challenges authority or does not easily defer to authority figures. The more ethnocentric we are, the less open or tolerant we are of other people’s cultural traditions or practices.

Skilled leaders cannot avoid issues related to ethnocentrism. Even as they recognize their own ethnocentrism, leaders also need to understand—and to a degree tolerate—the ethnocentrism of others. In reality, it is a balancing act for leaders. On the one hand, they need to promote and be confident in their own ways of doing things; on the other hand, they need to be sensitive to the legitimacy of the ways of other cultures. Skilled leaders are able to negotiate the fine line between trying to overcome ethnocentrism and knowing when to remain grounded in their own cultural values.

Prejudice

Closely related to ethnocentrism is prejudice. Prejudice is a largely fixed attitude, belief, or emotion held by an individual about another individual or group that is based on faulty or unsubstantiated data. It refers to judgments about others based on previous decisions or experiences. Prejudice involves inflexible generalizations that are resistant to change or evidence to the contrary (Ponterotto, Utsey, & Pedersen, 2006). Prejudice often is thought of in the context of race (e.g., European American vs. African American), but it also applies in areas such as gender, age, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, and other independent contexts. Although prejudice can be positive (e.g., thinking highly of another culture without sufficient evidence), it is usually negative.

As with ethnocentrism, we all hold prejudices to some degree. Sometimes our prejudices allow us to keep our partially fixed attitudes undisturbed and constant. Sometimes prejudice can reduce our anxiety because it gives us a familiar way to structure our observations of others. One of the main problems with prejudice is that it is self-oriented rather than other-oriented. It helps us to lessen our own anxiety and uncertainty at the expense of others. Moreover, attitudes of prejudice inhibit understanding by creating a filter that limits our ability to see multiple aspects and qualities of other people. Prejudice often shows itself in crude or demeaning comments that people make about others. Both ethnocentrism and prejudice interfere with our ability to understand and appreciate the human experience of others.

In addition to fighting their own prejudice, leaders face the challenge of dealing with the prejudice of followers. These prejudices can be toward the leader or the leader’s culture. Furthermore, it is not uncommon for a leader to face followers who represent several culturally different groups, and these groups have their own prejudices toward each other. Skilled leaders need to find ways to negotiate with followers from various cultural backgrounds as well as determine in what ways they can accept each other’s differences, minimize them within the organization, or use them for the benefit of the organization (Koch, Koch, Menon, & Shenkar, 2016).

Dimensions of Culture

Culture has been the focus of many studies across a variety of disciplines. In the past 30 years, a substantial number of studies have focused specifically on ways to identify and classify the various dimensions of culture. Determining the basic dimensions or characteristics of different cultures is the first step in being able to understand the relationships between them.

Several well-known studies have addressed the question of how to characterize cultures. For example, Hall (1976) reported that a primary characteristic of cultures is the degree to which they are focused on the individual (individualistic cultures) or on the group (collectivistic cultures). Taking a different approach, Trompenaars (1994) surveyed more than 15,000 people in 47 different countries and determined that organizational cultures could be classified effectively into two dimensions: egalitarian versus hierarchical, and person versus task orientation. The egalitarian–hierarchical dimension refers to the degree to which cultures exhibit shared power as opposed to hierarchical power. Person–task orientation refers to the extent to which cultures emphasize human interaction as opposed to stressing tasks to be accomplished.

Of all the research on dimensions of culture, perhaps the most referenced is the research of Hofstede (1980, 2001). Based on an analysis of questionnaires obtained from more than 100,000 respondents in more than 50 countries, Hofstede identified five major dimensions on which cultures differ: power distance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism–collectivism, masculinity–femininity, and long-term–short-term orientation. Hofstede’s work has been the benchmark for much of the research on world cultures.

In the specific area of culture and leadership, the studies by House, Hanges, Javidan, Dorfman, and Gupta (2004) offer the strongest body of findings to date, as published in the 800-page Culture, Leadership, and Organizations: The GLOBE Study of 62 Societies. These studies are called the GLOBE studies, named for the Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness research program. The GLOBE studies have generated a very large number of findings on the relationship between culture and leadership.

The GLOBE research program, which was initiated by Robert House in 1991, is an ongoing program that has involved more than 160 investigators to date. The primary purpose of the project is to increase our understanding of cross-cultural interactions and the impact of culture on leadership effectiveness. GLOBE researchers have used quantitative methods to study the responses of 17,000 managers in more than 950 organizations, representing 62 different cultures throughout the world. GLOBE researchers have collected data in a variety of ways, including questionnaires, interviews, focus groups, and content analysis of printed media. The findings of the GLOBE studies will be provided in more detail throughout this chapter.

As a part of their study of culture and leadership, GLOBE researchers developed their own classification of cultural dimensions. Based on their research and the work of others (e.g., Hofstede, 1980, 2001; Kluckhohn & Strodtbeck, 1961; McClelland, 1961; Triandis, 1995), GLOBE researchers identified nine cultural dimensions: uncertainty avoidance, power distance, institutional collectivism, in-group collectivism, gender egalitarianism, assertiveness, future orientation, performance orientation, and humane orientation. In the following section, each of the dimensions is described.

Uncertainty Avoidance

This dimension refers to the extent to which a society, an organization, or a group relies on established social norms, rituals, and procedures to avoid uncertainty. Uncertainty avoidance is concerned with the way cultures use rules, structures, and laws to make things more predictable and less uncertain. For example, cultures that have a high tolerance for uncertainty, such as the United States, are more likely to have a thriving entrepreneurial culture, where individuals are willing to take risks and make quick business decisions. In other cultures, such as Japan, taking risks and making daring decisions is not common; business deals are carefully thought through and examined before any decision can be made. As a result, business deals and negotiations take a long time, and require cultivation built on a level of trust and reliability that comes with a long-term commitment.

Power Distance

This dimension refers to the degree to which members of a group expect and agree that power should be shared unequally. Power distance is concerned with the way cultures are stratified, thus creating levels between people based on power, authority, prestige, status, wealth, and material possessions. In addition, how leaders exercise this power—for example, do they choose to use expert power rather than legitimate or reward power with their followers?—can be impacted by cultural dimensions (Mittal & Elias, 2016). Saudi Arabia is a good example of a country that has high power distance in that it sees power and authority as facts of life. Imagine the cultural issues that arise for a Saudi Arabian software engineer who manages a department for a high-tech startup in Silicon Valley where his American subordinates, who come from a low power distance culture, openly approach and disagree with him on issues even though he is the boss.

Institutional Collectivism

This dimension describes the degree to which an organization or a society encourages institutional or societal collective action. Institutional collectivism is concerned with whether cultures identify with broader societal interests rather than with individual goals and accomplishments. North Korea is an example of a culture with high institutional collectivism. The people are ruled by a Supreme Leader who oversees the development of the country’s values, which place a premium on collective efforts and nonmaterial incentives. As a result, group cohesion and loyalty is strictly required. Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un has placed the military at the center of the efforts to instill these values throughout North Korean society.

In-Group Collectivism

This dimension refers to the degree to which people express pride, loyalty, and cohesiveness in their organizations or families. In-group collectivism is concerned with the extent to which people are devoted to their organizations or families. They expect care from others in the in-group, and they have high degrees of loyalty to the group in return. Consensus and collaborative efforts are regarded as more valuable than individual action. For example, many Middle Eastern and Asian cultures, such as Iran and Pakistan, are high in in-group collectivism. They regard family and religious affiliation above all else, and individuals take great pride in their membership in small groups such as their families and circles of close friends (Ye, Ng, & Lian, 2015).

Gender Egalitarianism

This dimension measures the degree to which an organization or a society minimizes gender role differences and promotes gender equality. Gender egalitarianism is concerned with how much societies de-emphasize members’ biological sex in determining the roles that members play in their homes, organizations, and communities. A 2016 study found that the global gender gap is greatest in the area of political empowerment. Iceland is considered to be one of the world’s most gender-egalitarian countries, based on a firm belief that men and women should share power and influence equally. An extensive welfare system makes it easier for both sexes to balance work and family life (World Economic Forum, 2016).

Assertiveness

This dimension refers to the degree to which people in a culture are determined, assertive, confrontational, and aggressive in their social relationships. Assertiveness is concerned with how much a culture or society encourages people to be forceful, aggressive, and tough, as opposed to encouraging them to be timid, submissive, and tender in social relationships. Germany is high in the assertiveness dimension. In a study on upper-level managers in Germany, Brodbeck, Frese, and Javidan (2002) found that German managers used straightforward and direct language and that conflict and confrontational debate were acceptable approaches in a work environment.

Future Orientation

This concept refers to the extent to which people engage in future-oriented behaviors such as planning, investing in the future, and delaying gratification. Future orientation emphasizes that people in a culture prepare for the future as opposed to enjoying the present and being spontaneous. Americans, for example, believe they can plan and control the future and idealize change for the sake of changing.

Performance Orientation

This dimension describes the extent to which an organization or a society encourages and rewards group members for improved performance and excellence. Performance orientation is concerned with whether people in a culture are rewarded for setting and meeting challenging goals. Again, the United States is very high in performance orientation. One only has to look at how the country’s education department ranks schools as thriving or failing based on the results of standardized testing of students. If schools are not making the mark, there are interventions and programs to try to bring the scores up. The United States also compares its academic success with that of other countries to see where it is falling short or succeeding.

Humane Orientation

The ninth dimension refers to the degree to which a culture encourages and rewards people for being fair, altruistic, generous, caring, and kind to others. Humane orientation is concerned with how much a society or an organization emphasizes sensitivity to others, social support, and community values. Switzerland is a country that is often cited for its high humane orientation, based on the Swiss people’s helpfulness to others during and after World War I and World War II. The country espouses tolerance and responsibility as its central educational goals.

GLOBE researchers used these nine cultural dimensions to analyze the attributes of the 62 different countries in the study. These cultural dimensions formed the basis for studying how the countries varied in their approach to leadership.

Clusters of World Cultures

GLOBE researchers divided the data from the 62 countries they studied into regional clusters. 1 These clusters provided a convenient way to analyze the similarities and differences between cultural groups (clusters) and to make meaningful generalizations about culture and leadership.

To create regional clusters, GLOBE researchers used prior research (e.g., Ronen & Shenkar, 1985), common language, geography, religion, and historical accounts. Based on these factors, they grouped countries into 10 distinct clusters: Anglo, Germanic Europe, Latin Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe, Middle East, Confucian Asia, Southern Asia, Latin America, and Nordic Europe ( Figure 16.1 ). These 10 regional clusters are the groupings that were used in all of the GLOBE studies.

To test whether the clusters, or groups of countries, were valid, researchers did a statistical analysis of questionnaire data collected from individuals in each of the clusters. Their results indicated that the scores of respondents within a cluster correlated with one another but were unrelated to the scores of respondents in different clusters. From these findings, they concluded that each cluster was unique. In sum, these regional clusters represented a valid and reliable way to differentiate countries of the world into 10 distinct groups.

Figure 16.1 Country Clusters According to GLOBE

Source: From Culture, Leadership, and Organizations: The GLOBE Study of 62 Societies, by R. J. House, P. J. Hanges, M. Javidan, P. W. Dorfman, and V. Gupta (Eds.). Copyright 2004 by SAGE Publications, Inc. Reprinted with permission.

However, further research has pointed out that there are limitations to the clusters developed by the GLOBE studies (Brewer & Venaik, 2014). For example, India, which falls into the regional cluster of Southern Asia, has been found to have nine distinct subcultural regions, some of whose values are in contradiction to others (Dheer, Lenartowicz, & Peterson, 2015).

Characteristics of Clusters

In an effort to characterize the regional clusters, GLOBE researchers analyzed data from each of the regions using the dimensions of culture described earlier. Table 16.1 provides a classification of the cultural clusters in regard to how they scored on each cultural dimension. In the table, the nine cultural dimensions are listed in the left-hand column; the high-score and low-score regional clusters are provided in the next two columns. These are the regional clusters that were significantly higher or lower on particular dimensions than other regions. From these data, several observations can be made about the characteristics of these regional cultures.

Table 42

Anglo

The Anglo cluster consists of Canada, the United States, Australia, Ireland, England, South Africa (White sample), and New Zealand. These countries or populations were high in performance orientation and low in in-group collectivism. This means it is characteristic of these countries to be competitive and results oriented, but less attached to their families or similar groups than other countries.

Confucian Asia

This cluster, which includes Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, South Korea, and Japan, exhibited high scores in performance orientation, institutional collectivism, and in-group collectivism. These countries are results driven, and they encourage the group working together over individual goals. People in these countries are devoted and loyal to their families.

Eastern Europe

Included in this cluster are Greece, Hungary, Albania, Slovenia, Poland, Russia, Georgia, and Kazakhstan. These countries scored high on assertiveness, in-group collectivism, and gender egalitarianism. They scored low on performance orientation, future orientation, and uncertainty avoidance. People in this cluster tend to be forceful and supportive of their coworkers and to treat men and women equally. They are less likely to be achievement driven, to emphasize strategic planning, and to stress rules and laws as a way to maintain order.

Germanic Europe

The Germanic Europe countries, which include Austria, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Germany, scored high in performance orientation, assertiveness, future orientation, and uncertainty avoidance. They were low in humane orientation, institutional collectivism, and in-group collectivism. These countries value competition and aggressiveness and are more results oriented than people oriented. They enjoy planning and investing in the future and using rules and laws to give them control over their environment. At the same time, these countries are more likely to be individualistic and less group oriented. They tend not to emphasize broad societal groups.

Latin America

The Latin America cluster is made up of Ecuador, El Salvador, Colombia, Bolivia, Brazil, Guatemala, Argentina, Costa Rica, Venezuela, and Mexico. People in these countries scored high on in-group collectivism and low on performance orientation, future orientation, institutional collectivism, and uncertainty avoidance. People in these countries tend to be loyal and devoted to their families and similar groups but less interested in overall institutional and societal groups, and place less value on competition and goal-seeking behavior.

Latin Europe

Comprising Israel, Italy, Francophone Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, and France, the Latin Europe cluster exhibited more moderate and fewer high scores on any of the cultural dimensions, but scored low on humane orientation and institutional collectivism. It is characteristic of these countries to value individual autonomy and to place less value on the greater societal collective. Individuals are encouraged to watch out for themselves and to pursue individual rather than societal goals.

Middle East

This cluster is made up of Qatar, Morocco, Egypt, Kuwait, and Turkey. These countries scored high on in-group collectivism and low on future orientation, gender egalitarianism, and uncertainty avoidance. People in these countries tend to show great pride in their families and organizations. They are devoted and loyal to their own people. Furthermore, it is common for these countries to treat people of different genders in distinct ways. In the Middle East, orderliness and consistency are not stressed, and people do not place heavy reliance on policies and procedures. There is a tendency to focus on current issues as opposed to attempting to control the future.

Nordic Europe

The Nordic Europe cluster, which includes Denmark, Finland, and Sweden, exhibited several distinctive characteristics. This cluster scored high on future orientation, gender egalitarianism, institutional collectivism, and uncertainty avoidance, and low on assertiveness, in-group collectivism, and power distance. The Nordic people place a high priority on long-term success. Women are treated with greater equality. The Nordic people identify with the broader society and far less with family groups. In Nordic Europe, rules, orderliness, and consistency are stressed. Assertiveness is downplayed in favor of modesty and tenderness, and power is shared equally among people at all levels of society. Cooperation and societal-level group identity are highly valued by the Nordic people.

Southern Asia

The Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, India, Thailand, and Iran form the Southern Asia cluster. These countries exhibited high scores on humane orientation and in-group collectivism. Southern Asia could be characterized as countries that demonstrate strong family loyalty and deep concern for their communities.

Sub-Saharan Africa

The Sub-Saharan Africa cluster consists of Zimbabwe, Namibia, Zambia, Nigeria, and South Africa (Black sample). These countries or populations expressed high scores on humane orientation. In Sub-Saharan Africa, people generally are very concerned for and sensitive to others. Concern for family and friends is more important than concern for self.

Leadership Behavior and Culture Clusters

The overall purpose of the GLOBE project was to determine how people from different cultures viewed leadership. In addition, researchers wanted to determine the ways in which cultural characteristics were related to culturally endorsed leadership behaviors. In short, they wanted to find out how differences in cultures were related to differences in approaches to leadership.

The conceptualization of leadership used by GLOBE researchers was derived in part from the work of Lord and Maher (1991) on implicit leadership theory. According to implicit leadership theory, individuals have implicit beliefs and convictions about the attributes and beliefs that distinguish leaders from nonleaders and effective leaders from ineffective leaders (Junker & van Dick, 2014). From the perspective of this theory, leadership is in the eye of the beholder (Dorfman, Hanges, & Brodbeck, 2004). Leadership refers to what people see in others when they are exhibiting leadership behaviors.

To describe how different cultures view leadership behaviors in others, GLOBE researchers identified six global leadership behaviors: charismatic/value based, team oriented, participative, humane oriented, autonomous, and self-protective (House & Javidan, 2004). These global leadership behaviors were defined in these studies as follows:

Charismatic/value-based leadership reflects the ability to inspire, to motivate, and to expect high performance from others based on strongly held core values. This kind of leadership includes being visionary, inspirational, self-sacrificing, trustworthy, decisive, and performance oriented.

Team-oriented leadership emphasizes team building and a common purpose among team members. This kind of leadership includes being collaborative, integrative, diplomatic, nonmalevolent, and administratively competent.

Participative leadership reflects the degree to which leaders involve others in making and implementing decisions. It includes being participative and nonautocratic.

Humane-oriented leadership emphasizes being supportive, considerate, compassionate, and generous. This type of leadership includes modesty and sensitivity to other people.

Autonomous leadership refers to independent and individualistic leadership, which includes being autonomous and unique.

Self-protective leadership reflects behaviors that ensure the safety and security of the leader and the group. It includes leadership that is self-centered, status conscious, conflict inducing, face saving, and procedural.

These six global leadership behaviors emerged from the GLOBE research and were used to assess the different ways in which various cultural clusters viewed leadership. From this analysis, the researchers were able to identify a leadership profile for each cluster. Each profile describes the relative importance and desirability that different cultures ascribe to different leadership behaviors. The leadership profiles for each of the 10 culture clusters follow.

Figure 16.2 Culture Clusters and Desired Leadership Behaviors: Eastern Europe