Humane-oriented leadership involves being supportive, considerate, compassionate, and generous and .

Anglo - competitive and result oriented

Confucian Asia - result driven, encourage group working together over individual goals

Eastern Europe - forceful, supportive of co-workers, treat women with equality

Germanic Europe - value competition and aggressiveness and are more result oriented

Latin America - loyal and devoted to their families and similar groups

Written by Sedat Erdogan

           Every country has its own characteristics that make it different from others. Since globalization is a very important factor in business world, understanding the other cultures and their characteristics get a special attention from organizations. Before creating a job or a company in a different country, leaders-managers should analyze the society. This page is intended to give leaders-managers information about what kind of leadership style is best for what kind of culture or country.

   Now that culture is a hard topic to grasp in concepts, we search leadership literature and find that the Global Leadership and Organizational Effectiveness(GLOBE) study is the largest study in the field. The research project was initiated by Robert House in 1991, and is an ongoing program that has involved more than 160 investigators. 17,000 managers from 950 organizations were participated to the research project.  

We focus on the GLOBE study to systematically explain how leadership styles differ in terms of cultural differences.  The GLOBE team measure both cultural values and practices at both societal and organizational level. The preliminary purpose of their project is to describe, understand, predict the effect of cultural variables on leadership.

           The GLOBE team created their own classification of cultural differences based on the prior research and their own research. They identified 9 cultural dimensions.

These cultural dimensions are:

Uncertainty avoidance: The degree to which an organization or a society strive to abstain uncertainty of events by trust in rituals, social norms, and bureaucratic practices.

Power Distance: The extent to which an organization or a society anticipate and agree that power should be stratified and concentrated at higher levels of an organization.

Institutional Collectivism:  The degree to which societal institutional and organizational practices bolster and remunerate collective dispersion of collective action and resources

In-group Collectivism: The extent to which members of an organization and a society express loyalty, pride, and cohesiveness in their organization and society.

 Gender Egalitarianism: The degree to which an organization or a society minimizes gender role differences while promoting gender equality.

Future Orientation: The extent to which members of an organization or a society l engage in future-oriented behaviors such as delaying gratification, planning, and investing in the future.

Performance Orientation: The degree to which an organization or a society encourages and reward group members for performance improvement and excellence.

Humane Orientation: The degree to which a collective encourages and rewards members of an organization or a society for being fair, altruistic, friendly, generous, caring, and kind to others.

Assertiveness:  The degree to which members of organizations or societies are assertive, confrontational, and aggressive in social relationships.

The GLOBE team created regional clusters to analyze the similarities and differences between cultural groups and to make sound generalizations about leadership and culture. They test the validity of the cluster by statistical analysis ,and they indicate that the scores of respondents within a cluster correlated with one another but not correlated to the scores of respondents in different cluster.

Clusters and Characteristics of Clusters

The GLOBE team described 6 global leadership behavior to describe how different cultures view leadership behaviors different from other cultures.

These leadership behaviors:

Charismatic/ Value-Based Leadership: Reflects ability to motivate, to inspire, and to expect high performance outcomes from others based on firmly held core values. Leadership subscales: visionary, inspirational, self-sacrifice, integrity,  decisive, and performance oriented

Participative leadership:  Reflects the degree to which managers involve others in making and implementing decision.

Leadership subscales: non-participative and autocratic

Team-Oriented Leadership: Emphasizes effective team building and implementation of a common purpose or goal among team members.

Leadership Subscales:  team integrator,  collaborative team orientation, diplomatic, malevolent, and administratively competent

Human Oriented Leadership:  Focuses on supportive, considerate leadership, and compassion and generosity.

Leadership subscales: modesty and human orientation

Autonomous Leadership: Reflects to independent and individualistic leadership attributes. The leadership style is measured by a single sub-scale labeled autonomous leadership, consisting of individualistic, independence, autonomous, and unique attributes.

Self-Protective Leadership: Focuses on ensuring the safety and security of the individual and group through status enhancement and face savings.

Leadership subscales: status conscious, conflict inducer, self-centered, and procedural

As a result of their study on culture and leadership, they defined best leadership styles for clusters. Even though in their original study, they ranked the 6 leadership styles, we decided to show only 3 most important leadership styles for clusters.

                                                   Cultural Clusters and Leadership Styles

Every society has its own cultural characteristics. In order to understand a society and to lead an organization in the society, contemporary leaders need not only highly skilled managerial and leadership styles to lead an organization but also need to understand the employees and their characteristics. Global leaders should be able to reshape their own leadership styles by considering cultural differences in different societies.

 After searching the literature in terms of cultural differences and leadership, we see the GLOBE study is one of the best studies that investigates cultural differences and best leadership styles for certain cultures. The study shows us that best leadership characteristics for certain cultures are subject to change from culture to culture. There is not a leadership style that meets the needs of all societies. Therefore, as a group, we believe that managers and leaders should understand that there are some very important cultural differences that affect employees. To maximize the benefit from employees, leaders should take into consideration these differences and should adapt their leadership style by considering these differences.

References

House R.J. et al. (2004), Culture, Leadership, and Organizations: TheGLOBE Study of 62 Societies.

//www.inspireimagineinnovate.com/PDF/GLOBEsummary-by-Michael-H-Hoppe.pdf

//www.aabri.com/manuscripts/08011.pdf

//jethrolmi.com/admin/uploads/attachment-13-J-0010.pdf

//www.grovewell.com/pub-GLOBE-intro.html

//www.mba.biu.ac.il/stfhome/bijaoui/891/case/2011/culturehofsted.pdf

//www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/13602381.2010.496292

//t-bird.edu/wwwfiles/sites/globe/pdf/process.pdf

//www.grovewell.com/pub-GLOBE-dimensions.html

//www.grovewell.com/pub-GLOBE-precis.html

//www.grovewell.com/pub-GLOBE-intro.html

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