BGA | BUSINESS IMPACT
uch has been said and written about leadership in the social sciences and popular press. This attention comes as no surprise. Leadership is a pervasive social function found at many levels of our societies. Institutionalised leadership
Western business school, it would be easy to (mistakenly) think that leadership must be a recent and ‘WEIRD’ discovery. I do not mean WEIRD as in ‘odd’, but as in ‘Western’, ‘Educated’, ‘Industrialised’, ‘Rich’ and ‘Democratic’. In fact, most modern-day leadership research – and, especially, research on organisational leadership – has traditionally been conducted in Western contexts and with samples composed, mainly, of rich and educated managers, employees, or students coming from a handful of North American and European countries. The focus on such samples was, at least partly, accidental. Many researchers studying leadership just happened to work in Western countries, where WEIRD subjects abound. It is, therefore, not surprising that most theories have been derived and tested thanks to the observation of a relatively limited and culturally homogeneous subject pool. Yet, this ‘Northern American bias’ begot – and still begets – some key questions for leadership researchers. As we have studied mainly US and European leaders, are our theories and results valid in other cultural contexts? Are the leadership characteristics and behaviours deemed excellent in the West also applicable in other countries? Are we teaching ‘biased’ leadership techniques in our business school courses? To answer these questions, the field embarked on a truly ‘cross‑cultural leadership’ endeavour in the 1990s and early 2000s, as the rapid globalisation of markets and businesses made it urgent and practically relevant to tackle cross-cultural subjects. The most important study in this field is certainly the GLOBE (Global Leadership and Organisational Behaviour Effectiveness) project, which contributed to drawing a map of how effective leaders should behave in different countries. A cross-cultural map of leadership ideals The key idea behind GLOBE is that we all know a leader when we see one. That is, each of us has some ‘leadership ideals’, or some clear ideas of how ideal leaders should behave and which characteristics they should possess. For instance, some
roles exist in virtually all human organisations (from CEOs of companies to presidents of countries and football coaches, for example). In addition, extemporaneous and informal leaders often emerge in small groups of peers. And individuals that engage in the goal‑influencing process that we usually call ‘leadership’ do not only exist in contemporary societies, but they are also found in small-scale, traditional ones. Leadership is, therefore, a human universal. However, there seems to be no universal way to lead. On the contrary, casual observation suggests that the behaviours and the characteristics of leaders can differ quite substantially across the world. For instance, it is almost a cliché to imagine the prototypical American manager as a very decisive yet participative individual. On the contrary, it is commonplace to believe that the average Japanese boss requests strong deference to hierarchy and stresses status differentials. Are these impressions true or are such differences based on mere anecdotal evidence? And where do these differences come from? Research shows that leaders (and organisational leaders, more specifically) are indeed expected to behave differently around the world and that these present-day differences might also be due to factors that trace back to our ancient past. A WEIRD approach to leadership The study of leadership and of great leaders has a long tradition and features the contributions of world-famous philosophers and intellectuals from the East and the West, ranging from Aristotle to Max Weber. But if one were to read academic articles on leadership published just some years ago or enrol in a leadership course at a
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“Across cultures, individuals often expect different behaviours and attributes from their leaders”
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