Leading in cultural context: Annotated bibliography
This paper constitutes an annotated bibliography of websites, books and articles on leading in a cultural context. It constitutes of three websites, five books and twelve articles. The publications trace development of global leadership from cross-cultural management. They also look at the global and contextual competencies required for successful leadership, and how these are interpreted in various cultural contexts. Looking at various leadership types and styles, they analyze how these are perceived in different cultural contexts. Consequently, the researcher develops the thesis statement that “The type and style of leadership is dependent and shaped by the cultural context of the leader.”
Websites
Chamorro-Premuzic, T and Sanger, M (2016). What Leadership Looks Like in Different Cultures. https://hbr.org/2016/05/whaat-leadership-looks-like-on-different-cultures.
Noting that there are core competencies for good leadership that are universal, the study argues that the entire range of competencies for successful leadership is dependent on the cultural context. This is because cultures have different beliefs about the competencies required of a leader. The article hence argues that “good leadership is largely personality in the right place”.
Further, the article posits that the decision making, communication styles and dark-side tendencies of the leader are shaped by their cultural context. To illustrate this, the authors review six major leadership types as follows:
a) Decision making – the synchronized leader and the opportunistic leader.
b) Communications style – the straight shooting leader and the diplomatic leader.
c) Dark-side tendencies – the “kiss-up/kick down” leader.
b) Communications style – the straight shooting leader and the diplomatic leader.
c) Dark-side tendencies – the “kiss-up/kick down” leader.
The authors conclude that whereas it is possible to change leadership style to fit the relevant context, it is harder to change natural tendencies, predispositions and habits. The authors also acknowledge the role of organizational culture in leadership, noting that this requires a granular level of analysis to determine success factors.
Pkh5062 (2015). “Cultural context in leadership.” OLEAD 410: Leadership in a Global Context Blog. https://sites.psu.edu/global/2015/09/07/cultural-context-in-leadership/
This paper in a Penn State University course blog is by a user who posts under their handle. It looks at four of the six dimensions in cultural context for leadership as identified by Geert Hofstede to apply them to the cultural dimensions of Zappos, an online company that sells shoes and accessories. These four dimensions are power distance, individualism vs collectivism, masculinity vs feminity, and uncertainty avoidance.
The author notes that culture and leadership in an organization are intertwined, arguing that “culture tends to influence the leadership styles as leaders perform their duties but leadership also sets the tone for the culture in an organization.”
Meyer, E (2014). “Leadership Qualities: How to Lead Well Across Cultures.” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/insead/2014/05/13/leadership-qualities-how-to-lead-well-across-cultures/amp/.
An INSEAD Knowledge affiliate, Professor Erin Meyer argues that leadership style must be flexible to adapt to the cultural context. Citing a Heineken Manager who experienced differing levels of respect in Mexico and Netherlands, the author notes that the level of respect people accord authority is based on their cultural upbringing. Hence for an egalitarian culture such as found in the Netherlands there would be no much deference for authority – be it sibling, parent, teacher or boss – as opposed to the high deference for authority in the traditional Mexican culture.
Apart from respect for authority, the study also explores communication by people separated by two strata in a hierarchical chain of command as well as where the boss derives their aura of authority. This is with a view to establishing the power distances. It finds out that responses to these questions vary depending on the national culture. For example, 45% of Japanese felt that the boss should have answers for most questions from subordinates as opposed to 7% of Swedes.
In terms of how the leader is followed, the study finds that most East Asian countries derive their authority from Confucianism that has a hierarchy for interdependent relationships – be it at familial, community or organizations – with lower levels obeying the higher levels and higher levels offering mentorship and protection. They hence have a high-power distance culture.
Meyer takes the discussion to multinational organizations, located in many countries or with multicultural staff. He argues for flexibility in order to offer leadership to different individuals and organizations.
Books
Abramson, NR and Moran, RT (2014). Managing Cultural Differences: Global Leadership for the 21st Century, 10th edition. Routledge.
This book is a guide to international business, offering ideas on the prerequisite global leadership skills as well as a peek of the various cultures. It has “practical advice on how competitive advantage can be gained through effective cross-cultural management”. The book discusses such contemporary international business issues as the Middle East crisis, emerging markets as well as diversity and inclusion. The 1th edition also discusses global business ethics. Further, the book illuminates the discussion using many examples, case studies and online material. The book is also written in a simple language that endears it to the reader.
Hannum, KM, McFeeters, BB and Booysen, L (2010). Leading across differences: cases and perspectives. Pfeiffer.
There are concepts and situations important to leading across differences. This book provides examples and perspectives of these concepts and situations as derived from the seven-year Leadership Across Differences research project. The research aimed at understanding social identity tensions and conflicts in organizations as well as exploring the desired and the used leadership responses. The book is “a practical way to share the interesting things we were learning and to prompt informed dialogue.”
The book notes that despite people’s different histories, perspectives, beliefs and cultures, we all live in an interconnected world; being brought together in various ways at various places. Workplaces especially are bringing different people together, with people who know little about each other working together.
Hence differing perspectives and behavior become hard to understand and is confusing. This is because “there are often ingrained ideas and stereotypes that may be connected to strong negative feelings and beliefs” leading to “misunderstandings, tensions, and conflicts” that “impact on workplace morale and productivity”. The book looks at the various ways this negative situation can be avoided.
The examples are got from interviews of over a hundred people in twenty organizations from the five continents. The book poses new ways of thinking about leadership challenges. There is a framework and process that will help readers to understand their context better with a view to taking suitable action. Apart from the Leading Across Differences framework, there are “13 research-based cases, 11 chapters by various leadership experts, mine individual exercises as well as references and resources to extend the learning”.
Livermore, D (2015). Leading with Cultural Intelligence: The real secret to success. AMACOM.
The author argues that cultural intelligence is the key to initiating a global business and ensuring it survives and thrives since it is a critical capability for effective leadership in a multicultural, global, world. This enables fast adaptability to different cultural contexts. Rooted in scholarly research, cultural intelligence enables assessing and improving effectiveness in culturally diverse contexts. Its increasing importance in leadership development cannot be understated considering the continued globalization and diversity of organizations, and it is hence an important skill for a leader and for their teams.
The author details a four-step model for improving cultural quotient and for maximizing impact in managing across cultures. The four steps are drive, knowledge, strategy and action. The drive involves boosting motivation for and confidence in interacting with other cultures. Knowledge involves “understanding the relevance of differences in religion, values, norms and languages”.
Strategies involve planning for unfamiliar cultural settings whilst being flexible to ably adjust to the unexpected. Action involves adapting behavior to suit a specific situation.
The author, Professor David Livermore, is the president and partner at the Cultural Intelligence Center and author of Cultural Intelligence Difference. He has been involved in training and consultancy for leaders in over a 100 countries. The book has research, case studies and statistics geared towards improving cultural quotient. It is useful for leaders in both global and local contexts.
Wildman, J and Griffith, RL (eds.) (2015). Leading Global Team: Translating Multidisciplinary Science to Practice. Springer Nature.
By examining the “practical challenges of building, developing, adapting, training and managing multicultural global teams”, the book has details on the psychological and interpersonal skills needed to meet these challenges. It has a self-regulation approach that “offers cognitive keys to understanding and embracing differences and its associated complexities for successful global collaborations and lasting results.” It is on this basis that the book examines such leadership roles as building trust, reducing biases and effective use of feedback. The synthesis of theory and practice blends real-world experience and the science of global team leadership in addressing various issues facing he modern, multicultural, global organization.
According to the blurb, the core skills covered by the book are:
a) Structuring successful global virtual teams.
b) Developing cross-cultural competencies through global teams.
c) Managing active fault lines and conflicts in global teams.
d) Coaching global teams and global team leaders.
e) Utilizing feedback effectively across cultures.
f) Meeting the global need for leaders through Guided Mindfulness.
Ang, S and van Dyne, L (2015). Handbook of Cultural Intelligence. Routledge.
This book has contributions from scholars located throughout the world and hence offers diverse perspectives of cultural intelligence. The authors explore the relevance of cultural intelligence in managing diversity within and across cultures. The book looks at how people succeed in culturally diverse settings, focusing on the individual capabilities and specific characteristics.
The Handbook of Cultural Intelligence covers definitions, concepts, assessment approaches and application of cultural intelligence in domestic, international and cross-cultural management. The book is suitable for study of such disciplines as leadership, intercultural communication and organizational behavior. It will stimulate and guide future research and application of cultural intelligence.
Articles
Zander, L, Mockaitis, AI and Butler, CL (2012). “Leading Global Teams.” Journal of World Business, Volume 47:4, 592-603.
The article notes that work in multinational organizations is increasingly performed by global teams with national, cultural and linguistic heterogeneity and operating in globally dispersed virtual environments. With a focus on leadership competencies, styles, strategies and modes, the article reviews the literature on leading multicultural and virtual teams in a global context. The authors also “examine the emergent concepts of biculturalism, global mindset and cultural intelligence with respect to team leaders.” They identify three themes for global team leadership:
a) Leaders as boundary spanners, bridge makers and blenders.
b) People-oriented leadership
c) Leveraging diversity.
Further, the authors discuss the implications of these themes for theory and practice. The book gives insights about leading global teams, recent trends in global leadership and directions for future research.
Harris, A and Jones, M (2017). “Learning in Context: Putting international comparisons into perspective.” School Leadership & Management, Volume 37:5, 431-433. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/13632434.2017.1368864.
This article analyzes the fixation with “high performing” education systems for international benchmarking. It notes that there has been a concomitant increase in publications, reports and single-country accounts that “chart the progress and improvement trajectory of individual education systems”. These offer a basis for international comparison, highlighting other ways to improve educational performance. The article notes that the accounts offer guidance, strategies and inspiration that are important for better outcomes.
Further, the authors note that context and culture is an important consideration in the improvement of education at scale. Yet recent international assessments have tended to marginalize and minimalize cultural considerations, with the authors noting that consideration of the unpalatable cultural features tend to get in the way of borrowing strategies of high-performing systems.
Moreover, the negative side effects of borrowing strategies are conveniently ignored. The authors hence argue that one cannot cherry-pick strategies without understanding how they work or why they work in a particular context. It is hence important to analyze the cultural dynamics present in an education system. For example, most high performing school systems invest heavily in development of leaders yet copying, borrowing or buying leadership training packages hardly works as required.
Content and culture are hence important variables in improving a system with cultural influences being powerful in an intervention. Effective leaders ensure that interventions and innovations are responsive to culture and context. Culturally responsive leadership creates a welcoming school environment for all stakeholders and is also heavily dependent on the school setting. Leadership training programs should hence be relevant to different contexts. The paper further argues that building professional capacity and enhancing social capital requires greater consideration of cultural and contextual influences. The authors urge for “contemporary accounts of how leadership influences social processes in ways that are both contextually responsive and manifestly powerful.”
Mansour, J, Dorfman, PW, Howell, JP and Hanges, P (2010), “Leadership and cultural context: a theoretical and empirical examination based on Project GLOBE.” Handbook of Leadership Theory and Practice. Harvard Business Publishing.
This article looks at leadership in a cross-cultural environment by analyzing its nature and dynamics. This is based on that there are implicit leadership theories that guide organizations and societies. The organizations and societies also have beliefs about what constitutes effective leadership, beliefs that “shape individual’s perceptions about who and who is not a leader”.
The authors of the book examine the impact of national and organizational cultures on the implicit leadership attributes through an integrative and multilevel approach. The authors also “present a series of hypotheses on the relationship between specific cultural dimensions and specific leadership attributes”. These hypotheses are tested using the GLOBE database of outstanding leadership dimensions, with the authors presenting their conclusions.
Song, Hellen and Yap, Kristina (2015). “Leadership in a Cross-Cultural Context: A Qualitative Study of Cross-Cultural Leadership Competence in a Multinational Organization in China.” Research study conducted at Stockholm University.
This article explores the competencies required to manage staff in a cross-cultural context in China. This involved study of Chinese employees in a Western organization in China with a view to understanding interaction of Western and Chinese cultures.
The study aimed to find out the competencies required for managerial positions in the organization as well as the interpretations of these competencies. It found out that the most important competencies required for the managerial positions are to manage, to have expertise and to communicate. To manage involved ability to lead a team, to care and to be able to build personal relationships. To have expertise involved having specialist knowledge, knowledge of the national culture and knowledge of the market. To communicate involved the ability to include and to convey.
The responses across the organization were very similar in interpretation of cross-cultural leadership competence, which, according to the authors could be attributed to a strong organizational culture. Differences in interpretation were however found across generations. The study concludes that leaders should recognize that national, organizational and generational cultures impinge on the meaning of cross-cultural leadership competencies, and should hence exercise leadership accordingly.
Latta, GF (2009). “A Process Model of Organization Change in Cultural Context (OC3Model): The impact of organizational culture on leading change.” Journal of Leadership & Organizational Change, https://doi.org/10.1177/15480518809334197.
The paper notes that change is embedded in leadership, with organizational culture being an important situational variable in implementing change. It “introduces a process model of organizational change in cultural context (OC3 Model) derived from ethnographic analysis. The model delineates the differential impact of organizational culture at every stage of change implementation.” It identifies and illustrates eight stages of cultural influence. To encourage refinement of the OC3 Model, the study states the research propositions. Further, the paper explores the theoretical and practical implications of the model on leadership and discusses ways to resolve organizational immunity to change.
Hanges PJ, Aiken, JR, Park, J and Su, J (2016). “Cross-cultural Leadership: leading around the world.” Current Opinion in Psychology, Volume 8, April 2016, 64-69. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2015.10.013
The article discusses recent research that shows leadership characteristics, attributes and behaviors are affected by culture, noting that traditional cross-cultural literature is laden with evidence of how culture affects leadership. Viewing societal culture as a contextual variable in the situational models of leadership, the authors show that societal culture moderates the relationship between leadership styles and concomitant outcomes. Focusing on leaders of culturally diverse followers, the authors also review global leadership. Finally, the authors recommend further areas for research in this area and discuss the integration of literatures about cross-cultural and global leadership.
Hallinger, P (2016). “Bringing context out of the shadows of leadership.” Educational Management Administration & Leadership, December 2, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1177/1741143216670652
Citing various literature, the authors posit that school leadership impacts on school performance. They note a growing consensus for adoption of a set of leadership practices to meet the needs and constraints of various school contexts albeit the lack of a theory or comprehensive report addressing the challenge. The identified set of leadership practices include goal setting and developing people.
Further, the paper analyzes various types of school contexts and their effect on school leadership practice. Some of the contexts discussed include institutional, community, socio-cultural, political, economic and school improvement. The analysis leads the author to several conclusions and recommendations. This includes affirmation, elaboration and extension of the assertion that leadership should be examined in context.
Contextualizing leadership “highlights deficiencies in modal research methods that focus on mean effects and either ignore context effects or relegate them to the shadows.” Noting deficiencies in existing research, the author calls for refining of current research methods and exploration of new approaches for more comprehensive studying of “how successful leadership responds and adapts to different contexts”.
Koch, PT, Koch, B, Menon, T and Shenkar O (2016). “Cultural friction in leadership beliefs and foreign-invested enterprise survival.” Journal of International Business Studies, Volume 47:4, 453-470.
The authors augur that cultural differences can either be synergistic or disruptive. Noting that cultural friction does not specify when and how the synergies or disruptions emerge, they theorize that “synergies will emerge in foreign-invested enterprises when cultural differences in leadership beliefs are central to the host nation’s cultural identity; while disruption will occur when differences are in more culturally central leadership beliefs.” Their hypotheses are supported from an analysis of the survival data from 274 foreign-invested enterprises in China. As per the authors’ predictions, there was higher firm death for firms with differences in participative and team-oriented GLOBE leadership dimensions while there was higher firm survival for firms with differences in the charismatic, autonomous and self-protective GLOBE leadership dimensions. The authors consequently found out that differences may need to be accepted or minimized in certain areas while the differences are beneficial in other areas. Consequently, they conclude that managers need to identify “more central aspects of local culture to determine whether to minimize differences or to leverage their synergistic potential.”
Aktas, M, Gelfand, MJ and Hanges PJ (2015). “Cultural Tightness-Looseness and Perceptions of Effective Leadership.” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, September 22, 2015.
The study research is an addition to the the investigation of the relationship between cultural values and leadership. It also “examines how the strength of social norms influences perceptions of effective leadership.” The study utilizes GLOBE’s leadership research and data from Gelfand, Raver et al. to examine leader competencies required for effective tight and loose cultures.
The journal article indicates that the findings of the study as “cultural tightness sis positively related to the endorsement of autonomous leadership and negatively related to the endorsement of charismatic and team leadership, even controlling for in-group collectivitism, power distance, and future orientation of the societal and organizational level of analysis.” The theoretical and practical implications of the study are discussed.
Bird, A and Mendenhall, ME (2015). “From Cross-Cultural Management to Global Leadership: Evolution and adaptation.” Journal of World Business, 51:1, October 2015. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jwb.2015.10.005.
This quasi review traces the development of global leadership. Consequently, it maps out the trajectory of global leadership from its origins in cross-cultural management. The evolutionary trends of cross-cultural management and their influence on global leadership formation and development are also discussed.
The authors of the research study also discuss the theoretical and practical implications of the study insofar as future research and the managerial practice field are concerned.
Caligiuri, P and Bonache, J (2016). “Evolving and enduring challenges in global mobility.” https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jwb.2015.10.001. Journal of World Business Studies, January 2016, Volume 51:1, 127-141.
This study traces the science and practice of organization’s global mobility over the past 50 years. It highlights the issues that have endured over the years as well as those that have changed, with many experiencing change because of economic, competitive and demographic changes.
The first part of the article looks at global mobility, one of the continuums that witnesses constant changes due to strategic deployment of expatriates, changes in assignments and changes in expatriate profiles.
The second part of the article reviews enduring continuums. These include change in individual competencies to be suitable to live and work in another country as well as personality and motivation suitable for success abroad. The study reviews these particular enduring continuums as they relate to the fields of neuroscience and human development. The study also discusses the implications of the enduring and evolving continuums to future research and practice.
Mittal, R, (2015). “Charismatic and transformational leadership styles: A cross-cultural perspective.” International Journal of Business and Management, Volume 10:3, 26.
The book acknowledges the influence of culture on leadership, noting that different styles of leadership will have different impacts in different cultural contexts. The paper examines two different styles of leadership – charismatic leadership and transformational leadership – in the context of individualism-collectivism and tightness-looseness cultural dimensions. The study further presents a conceptual framework for interaction of the two leadership styles and two cultural dimensions.
The study advocates for charismatic leadership in individualistic and loose cultures and advocates for transformational leadership in collectivistic and tight societies. The study findings have implications on the “design of leadership intervention programs for businesses spanning more than one culture.”
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