BGA | BUSINESS IMPACT
LEADERSHIP
of us believe that effective leaders should be democratic and protective of their followers, whereas others think that ideal leaders should be strong and directive. These ideals might depend on a myriad of individual factors, but the novel notion brought to the fore by GLOBE was that individuals belonging to different cultural groups might share systematically different leadership ideals. These ideals are learned during one’s life (possibly, when one is still young) thanks to interactions with parents, teachers and group leaders in a specific cultural context. To test the idea that leadership ideals might vary across cultural groups, GLOBE researchers took an apparently simple approach: they asked many individuals directly which leadership attributes they deem more or less desirable. While intuitive, this research effort has been logistically and methodologically titanic. We are talking about thousands of questionnaires administered to middle managers working in hundreds of companies located in about 60 different countries. Specifically, these questionnaires asked middle managers to rate their perceived appropriateness/effectiveness of more than 100 items describing specific leadership attributes (for example, ‘diplomatic’, ‘bossy’ and ‘administratively skilled’). Thanks to these responses, researchers managed to derive different ‘macro-dimensions’ of leadership (such as autocratic leadership, visionary leadership and face-saving leadership) and to then explore whether such dimensions are seen as more or less effective in different geocultural clusters. How do cultural attitudes to leadership differ? “So, how should I behave in different cultures to be seen as an effective leader?” you might ask at this point. As often happens in research, the correct answer to this question is: “It depends.” Yet, the GLOBE results suggest at least three key conclusions for both researchers and practitioners: • There are some universally positive attributes of leadership. These characteristics are appreciated in virtually all societies studied. For instance, leaders’ descriptors such as ‘communicative’ or ‘dynamic’ are seen as facilitating outstanding leadership everywhere. • GLOBE also found some universally negative attributes of leadership – ‘irritable’, ‘ruthless’, or ‘dictatorial’, for instance, are all seen as major impediments to outstanding leadership everywhere. • The GLOBE project highlights some leadership characteristics and behaviours that are particularly effective in some countries, but less effective in others. For instance, followers in Northern Europe tend to prefer ‘participative’ leaders (ie leaders that encourage consensus-based decision-making, delegation and consultation) but do not highly value leader behaviours related to compassion and generosity. However, followers in the Middle East or Confucian Asia tend to see participative leadership less positively and endorse more status-conscious leaders. Aside from describing ideal leadership profiles for various geocultural areas, results from GLOBE also highlight how specific dimensions of national culture predict differences in leadership
ideals. Simply put, the idea is that each society has relatively stable norms and values that tend to be endorsed somewhat homogeneously by all its members. In turn, these stable norms and values – culture, in short – predict the expectations about leadership that each society has. For instance, societies scoring highly on the cultural value of power distance, where hierarchical differences are seen as normal and are widely accepted, tend to prefer more directive leadership and less visionary and inspirational leadership. Societies with a high uncertainty avoidance, which rely on formal and informal rules to cope with the uncertainty of future events, tend to endorse compassionate and generous leaders. Where do these differences come from? The GLOBE results offer us a valuable and complex picture of what individuals want from their leaders across cultures. This descriptive evidence is vital for researchers and practitioners alike, who often need to manage teams in which members come from different cultures, or work in multicultural environments. Yet these studies do not answer some more basic questions about the origins of such differences. Why do cultural differences in leadership ideals exist? Where do these differences ultimately come from? Why do we even like the leaders we actually like? These questions are rather novel, so it is not so surprising that most leadership theories are still relatively silent on them. Some suggest that the differences in leadership ideals across the world might be driven by the differences in political and economic environments. Others indicate that geographical factors might play a role. Other theories imply that pre-existing cultural differences such as religion, philosophical tradition or other dimensions of culture might cause societies to have different expectations about leadership. The influence of pre-industrial agricultural practices While all the previously mentioned factors are probably important, they might not give the whole story. In a study published in The Leadership Quarterly , I explore an alternative possibility: whether pre-industrial agricultural practices are related to contemporary leadership ideals and organisational practices. This work moves from a simple observation derived from the GLOBE data. In some societies, leaders are expected to delegate, empower their subordinates and be consultative, whereas leaders demand more obedience and provide clear guidance to their subordinates in other societies. Why do these differences exist? Building on literature in anthropology, archaeology and classical comparative history, I suggest that agricultural intensification in pre-industrial times (for example, the use of the plough, irrigation and hillside terracing) generated important societal changes that led to the emergence of more authoritarian and directive forms of leadership. Intensive agriculture brought about an increase in group size, complexity and diversity that called for the emergence of stronger and more directive leaders that could ‘manage’ and coordinate such complex groups. The higher agricultural
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