[PDF] Interpersonal leadership across cultures: a historical exposé and a

View - Download Interpersonal leadership across cultures: a historical exposé and a

Previous PDF

Next PDF

Interpersonal leadership across cultures: a historical expos?e and a research agenda

Lena Zander

Department of Business Studies, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden

ABSTRACT

Culture has a profound impact on interpersonal leadership, which refers to an everyday type of leadership involving leader interaction with subordi- nates. Typical interpersonal leadership actions include empowering, provid- ing support and development, directing, following-up and giving feedback, as well as communicating and encouraging collaboration in teamwork. In early comparative leadership studies, variation in leadership behavior across countries was assumed to be due to cultural differences. This assumption was later empirically supported by cross-cultural leadership research. As lead- ership behaviors in multi-country studies did not demonstrate similar asso- ciative patterns regarding interpersonal leadership in different countries, the use of mainstream single-country derived leadership meta-categories was invalidated. New reliable, robust and culturally endorsed interpersonal lead- ership dimensions were developed and measured in large-scale, multi-coun- try studies. These emerged from different perspectives: that of leader- centeredness measuring ideal leadership prototypes, and that of employee- centeredness, where subordinate preferences for interpersonal leadership are essential to granting the leader the"License to Lead."Deliberations on fundamental issues in studying interpersonal leadership across national bor- ders in combination with contemporary trends, such as distance leadership, global virtual teams and intersectionality, led to the formulation of research implications and a research agenda for a better understanding of interper- sonal leadership in the future.

KEYWORDS

Comparative leadership;

cross-cultural leadership; cultural dimensions; ideal leadership prototypes; interpersonal leadership Leadership continues to fascinate us, especially leadership by visionary leaders who move mountains

with thousands of followers, or those at the forefront of solving world enigmas, tackling social chal-

lenges or"wicked problems,"as well as offering support and solutions in times of global crises. But there is also the less-recognized and less-spoken-of"everyday"leadership, where someone is respon- sible for organizing activities and leading others to make them happen. Early examples of such "interpersonal leadership"relationships could be that of parent and child, or teacher and pupil, and as adults at work we, for example, find ourselves in manager and subordinate, or team leader and team member relationships (Zander1997). Interpersonal leadership is all around us, almost wher- ever we choose to look, at places of work, education, or even in recreation. Think of your yoga teacher this morning - did everybody in the room follow the instructor's lead? And as to your global project team at work, did the team members carry out the activities that you as a team leader had assigned them? Most probably the answer to those two questions is yes, or at least, yes as much as possible given participant competence and capacity (and flexibility!).

CONTACTLena Zander

?2021 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://

creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the

original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. INTERNATIONAL STUDIES OF MANAGEMENT & ORGANIZATION

2020, VOL. 50, NO. 4, 357-380

Interpersonal leadership typically involves communication and tasking others with work, empowering and participating in decision-making, follow-up and giving feedback, providing sup- port, development and taking an interest in others'careers, as well as encouraging collaboration with colleagues and teamwork (Zander1997). Such everyday actions and interactions are precisely what Alvesson and Sveningsson (2003) thought worthy of further study, after having heard mid- dle and senior managers'"...accounts of their work in ways that are more in line with the mun- dane than with the grandiose and heroic leadership talk found, not only in business press and among top-management but also in the more academic literature"(1437). Although we can think of interpersonal leadership as a taken-for-granted everyday element of working life, this does not necessarily make it mundane in the sense of being uninteresting. On the contrary, it suggests that detailed examination is warranted to more fully understand the basic fabric of human endeavor.

After all, interpersonal leadership is vital for coordination and collaboration of activities toward a

common goal, and, as such, has been and still is fundamental to human survival and society (Koski, Xie, and Olson2015; Pietraszewski2020; Zander1997). Moreover, as enthusiastically noted by George Bradt, a senior contributor toForbes(2020), interpersonal leadership is about leading other people, and the challenge is how to enable and empower them to do their absolute best to realize a shared purpose and reach those common goals. Despite coordination and collaboration's erstwhile existence and criticality to human action, interpersonal leadership does not take on the same guise from one country to another. Available literature provides ample empirical evidence of multi-country variation, linked to cultural explan-

ations. The overall ambition in this article is to further our understanding of interpersonal leader-

ship across cultures, and - after a discussion of past and contemporary research conducted in multiple-country studies - set a research agenda of where future research should be headed. I commence by briefly introducing what can be perceived as the conceptual background of inter- personal leadership in mainstream single-country studies, and by explaining why this conceptualiza- tion cannot simply be used untouched in multi-country studies. In a historical expos ?e of multiple- country leadership research, homing in on the type of leader-follower (superior-subordinate, team leader-team member) interaction and actions typical for interpersonal leadership, I also identify empirical roots to interpersonal leadership. The first batch of studies that I review compares and

contrasts leadership across countries. These studies hypothesize (but do not test) that the identified

differences could be explained by cultural variation. The second batch of cross-cultural leadership

studies that I review examine whether differences across countries are indeed linked to national cul-

ture. From there I move to two sets of leadership measures, comparable across countries and cultur- ally endorsed from the outset, in the forms of ideal leadership prototypes (House et al.2004) and interpersonal leadership (Zander1997). In the discussion, the viability of cross-cultural leadership research is addressed, and an agenda outlined for a way forward for future research on interpersonal leadership, before wrapping up the article with concluding reflections. A historical expos?e of interpersonal leadership research Interpersonal leadership, with its presence in our everyday life and importance for, simply put, getting things done with the help of others, is not commonly referred to as such. 1

This is surpris-

ing, as an interaction between leader and follower, superior and subordinate, team leader and team member is fundamental to collaboration and coordination of human action. On-line search- ing for"interpersonal leadership"as a distinct concept will not result in many hits. One of the few exceptions, apart from publications based on my own work (see, e.g., Zander

1997; Zander2002; Zander2005; Zander and Romani2004), is an article by Lamm, Carter, and

Lamm (2016), who set out to integrate earlier literature when theorizing about interpersonal lead- ership. Drawing on comprehensive works by Bass and Bass (2008), Fleishman et al. (1991), and Yukl, Gordon, and Tabe (2002), Lamm, Carter, and Lamm (2016) list leadership behaviors that 358
they classify as interpersonal leadership: delegating, empowering and promoting collective deci- sion-making; recognizing, supporting and developing others; understanding, caring and consider- ation of others; facilitating and encouraging teamwork; and communication and information dissemination. 2 Most of the behaviors identified by Lamm, Carter, and Lamm (2016) fall into what has earlier been seen as typical for"people- and relationship-oriented"leadership, whereas more"task-oriented"leadership behaviors would include: directing and supervising work, requir- ing that subordinates follow rules and procedures, follow-up and providing negative feedback (such as criticizing poor work), but could also entail having a goal-orientated focus. People-oriented and task-oriented leadership are two well-recognized categorizations strongly rooted in research based on single-country studies (mostly mainstream research in the USA).

Other conceptualizations, under other labels (e.g., task- vs. relation-oriented leadership, initiating

structure vs. consideration, production-centered vs. people-centered, or directive vs. supportive) largely correspond in definition and content with the people- and task-orientation dichotomy. Yukl, Gordon, and Tabe (2002) empirically examined, analyzed and integrated half a century of leadership behavior research on what makes a leader effective. Relations-oriented and task- oriented leadership were inYukl, Gordon, and Tabe's (2002) hierarchical taxonomy of leadership behavior joined by"change-oriented leadership,"which essentially built on transformational and charismatic leadership. 3 Turning to more recent integrative reviews, we still find these three leadership categories; rela- tion-oriented, task-oriented and change-oriented (Bormann, Rowold, and Bormann2016;

Inceoglu et al.2018; Kaluza et al.2020),

4 and they remain strongly linked to leadership effective- ness (Yukl2012; Yukl et al.2019). But, after a prolific increase in the number of leadership cate- gorizations during the 2000s and the 2010s, scholars were worried about conceptual redundancy, that there would be a lack of discriminant validity. The concern that new constructs 5 were too similar to existing ones, as in the case of transformational and charismatic leadership (included in the change-oriented leadership category), were theoretically argued and statistically demon- strated to be too close to participatory, empowering and supportive types of leadership behavior (Bormann and Rowold2018; Van Knippenberg and Sitkin2013). Today, relations-oriented and task-oriented behaviors still remain conceptually and empirically distinct categories of leadership, each consisting of a set of separate leadership behaviors. However, these categories have predominantly been derived, surveyed and validated in single- country studies. Although almost the same bifurcation has emerged over and over again in sin- gle-country studies, leadership behaviors may, however, not be perceived in a similar associative manner from one country to another. This inhibits configuration into the relations-oriented and task-oriented constructs when carrying out multi-country studies. Throughout this article, and for the sake of simplicity, I use the term"leadership behaviors"

although it is rare that actual behavior is studied. Instead, it is leadership beliefs, attitudes, ideals,

expectations, as well as perceived and preferred leadership behavior that have been in focus. In the historical review that follows, I examine and identify empirical roots by querying which types of behaviors of interpersonal leadership have been found to vary across countries in the extant lit- erature. I begin with the description of multi-country comparative leadership studies carried out from the 1960s to the mid-1990s, and then proceed with the description of cross-cultural research from mid-1990s and onwards. In the review, I concentrate on articles that are based on multi- country studies. To properly account for differences in national cultures that have the potential to yield convincing results it is important to include many more than two countries (Bond and Smith2018), as argued by Smith, Peterson, and Schwartz (2002, 189):"culture-level studies must include an adequately representative range of currently existing nations." In Banai's(2010) review of Jean Boddewyn's contribution to comparative management he accounts for three fundamental questions raised by Boddewyn (1965) when carrying out com- parative management studies: (1) compared to what?, (2) compared in relation to what?, and (3) INTERNATIONAL STUDIES OF MANAGEMENT & ORGANIZATION compared for what?. The comparative leadership review below focuses on studies that are com- parative across countries, identifying variables that compare different aspects of interpersonal leadership, with the purpose of figuring out whether they can be used in multi-country studies and whether they vary across countries.

Multi-country comparative leadership

Studies carried out in the 1960s and 1970s assumed a bi-polar view of leadership with autocratic- directive practices as one end-pole, and democratic-participative management at the opposite end and were carried out in five to 14 countries in the Americas, Asia, Europe and the Middle East (Al-Jafary and Hollingsworth1983; Bass et al.1979; Haire, Ghiselli, and Porter1966; Redding and Casey1976). Leadership differences across countries or groups of countries were reported in

all studies. To measure bi-polar leadership, tasks such as the use of authority, direction, influence,

participation in decision-making, rewards, and sanctions were examined in these studies. A meth- odological weakness when using these measures of bi-polar leadership styles is that respondents scored highly on preferences for a participatory leadership style on some questions and on prefer- ences for autocratic leadership style on others, but not fully adhering to one type or the other across countries. Toward the end of the 1970s and into the mid-1980s, employee democracy and participation was suddenly the center of attention among scholars and practitioners alike. Employee participa- tion in decision-making, the decision-making methods that managers use, and the degrees of industrial democracy in terms of employee influence systems were topics of interest in several multi-country comparative studies (Bottger, Hallein, and Yetton1985; Heller and Wilpert1981; IDE1976,1979; Sadler and Hofstede1976; Schaupp1978). Moving away from bi-polar leadership studies, scholars developed scales to depict a directive to participative continuum of decision- making. These scales typically span from"the leader alone makes the decision and tells the subordinates"via"the leader explains the decision to subordinates"and"the leader consults sub- ordinates prior to decision-making"to that the decision is made"jointly or in consensus with subordinates."A few studies (Heller and Wilpert1981; IDE1976, Industrial Democracy in Europe International Research Group (IDE)1979studies) added a fifth alternative to the scale, namely that the decision is"delegated to the subordinates,"while Bottger, Hallein, and Yetton (1985) added group-based decision-making alternatives to the scale. All of these studies reported differences across the four to 12 countries included in the surveys. Respondents were sampled in Argentina and Brazil in South America, the Australia-Pacific region, Europe, and North America, as well as in India, Israel, and Japan. The degree of participation in decision-making varied with

the type of issue to be resolved. Long-term strategic decisions, for instance, included less partici-

pation from subordinates than decision-making directly related to their own work. Research had moved from the earlier bi-polar view to a more nuanced description of participation levels along a continuum. By using more detailed response alternatives, a clearer picture emerged of how par- ticipation policies, practices and preferences varied across countries. The work by Likert (1961,1967), originally developed in the United States and aimed at iden- tifying country level"management systems"that influence leadership practices, was also put to use in multi-country research. To identify which of the four Likert systems: (1) exploitative authoritative, (2) benevolent authoritative, (3) consultative, and (4) participative 6 characterizes a country, scores from a set of statements on leadership, decision-making, goal-setting, motivation and communication were added together. For example, Al-Jafary and Hollingsworth (1983) iden- tified a management system for the Arabian Gulf region (based on responses from four countries) and compared it to that identified for the United States. One problem with using Likert's four management systems was that countries with significantly different scores across statements still ended up having the same"system."These studies suffer from similar methodological difficulties 360
as the early bi-polar studies. However, an example provided by Pavett and Morris (1995) demon- strates how the Likert's four authoritative-participation systems measures can be used to make meaningful comparisons due to the research design selected by the authors. The degree of employee participation could be compared across five countries due to fact that the factory plants were owned by the same multinational company. Pavett and Morris (1995) found that the degree of participation displayed vast differences across the Italian, Mexican, Spanish, American, and English plants, despite being set up and managed in the same way by their US owner. Tannenbaum et al. (1974), with a follow-up project headed by Tannenbaum and Rozgonyi (1986), embarked on a unique research design to investigate participation in decision-making. Tannenbaum et al. (1974) studied organizations in five countries that had explicitly declared to have management systems based on different degrees of participation in decision-making. The study was carried out from a subordinate perspective, and questions were asked about both actual and ideal levels of participation as well as authority and influence over people and activities. As hypothesized they identified that the Kibbutz in Israel and the Yugoslav plants were more partici-

pative than the plants in the USA and Austria, while the Italian plants were the least participative.

However, the findings also demonstrated that even in organizations identified as highly participa- tive, authority and influence was hierarchically distributed. Another unexpected finding was that participation in the form of inviting in employees'ideas and suggestions was present in firms without systematic participatory practices, but not so in firms that actually had employee partici- pation systems in place. In sum, my review of comparative multi-country studies of leadership between the 1960s and

mid-1990s (seeTable 1), results in three critical observations. First, that there were difficulties in

using leadership constructs derived in single-country studies in other countries, for example, the bipolar autocratic-directive versus democratic-participative management practices, or the four "country systems."Non-consistent response to questions used to measure each different construct pattern across countries led to both low validity and low reliability, resulting in Smith et al.'s (1992) recommendation for identify leadership measures that are comparable across countries from the onset. Second, almost all studies included participation in decision-making as well as other aspects of interpersonal leadership such as authority, directing, influence, rewards, sanc- tions, goal-setting, motivation and communication. Third, the identified variation in interpersonal leadership-related attitudes, assumptions, beliefs and behavior across country borders was posited to be due to culture, but not tested. This was instead done in the years to follow, reviewed in the next batch of studies that concentrate on cross-cultural leadership in multi-country research projects.

Cross-cultural leadership

From the mid-1980s and into the mid-1990s comparative leadership research was characterized by a growing concern about the implications of using instruments developed in one country for mapping leadership styles in multi-country studies. A group of international scholars launched a large-scale project to test leadership measures used in a Japanese research program (Misumi

1985) in other countries (see, e.g., Smith et al.1989; Smith et al.1992). The early Lewin and

Lippitt (1938) and Lewin, Lippett, and White's(1939) research had served as a starting point for what became a systematic interdisciplinary research program that lasted for 30years in Japan and led to the development of the Japanese-based Performance-Maintenance (PM) leadership theory (Misumi and Peterson1985). "Performance"and"Maintenance"in the PM-theory are similar to, but not the same as, the task-oriented and people-oriented categorizations of leadership. The findings from PM research in Japan showed that general leadership functions differed from specific leadership practices that varied depending on the investigated organizational context. Misumi and Peterson (1985) thought INTERNATIONAL STUDIES OF MANAGEMENT & ORGANIZATION Table 1.Comparative interpersonal leadership studies mid-1960s to the mid-1990s.

Authors

a Countries included in the study Interpersonal leadership type of measures

Haire, Ghiselli, and

Porter (1966)3,641 Managers in 14 countries

(Argentina, Belgium, Chile, Denmark

England, France, Germany, Italy,

India, Japan, Norway, Spain, Sweden,

and USA)Democratic-participative vs. autocratic-directive leadership practices measured by assumptions and attitudes about: participation in decision- making, directing, instructions & information, rewards & punishment (e.g., no promotion) Tannenbaum et al. (1974) 1,600 Employees in 5 countries (Austria, Israel, Italy, Yugoslavia, and USA)Participative vs. authoritative-directive leadership practices measured by actual and ideal attitudes and behavior about: influence, participation in decision-making, interpersonal participation in decision-making (solicit and use subordinate opinions & suggestions), rewards and sanctions Redding and Casey (1976) 1,000 Managers in 8 Asian countries (Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan,

Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore,

South Vietnam, and Thailand)Democratic-participative vs. autocratic-directive leadership practices. Replication of Haire, Ghiselli, and Porter (1966) study Sadler and Hofstede (1976) 3,073 Employees in 6 countries (Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, Japan, and UK)Four leadership decision-making styles from"leader decides and tells subordinates,""leaders'decides and explains,""consults subordinate before decision-making"to"joint decision-making with subordinates"based on Tannenbaum and

Schmidt (1973)

IDE (1979) 997 Employees in 12 countries

(Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France,

Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Israel,

Netherlands, Norway, Sweden,

and Yugoslavia)Perceived and preferred decision-making method on a scale from:"subordinates not involved," "subordinates informed,""opinions given by subordinates,""subordinates'opinion taken into account,""equal weight in decision-making"to "subordinate's own decision"

Schaupp (1978) 800 Employees in 8 countries

(Argentina, Canada, France, (West)

Germany, India, Japan, Netherlands,

and United Kingdom)Perceived and preferred decision-making method on a scale from: from"leaders'own decision," "leaders decide but explain to subordinates" "leaders consult subordinates before decision- making,"to"consensus decision-making if possible" Bass et al. (1979) 1,046 Managers from 12 national groupings (Belgium, Britain, [Germany and

Austria data pooled], France, Iberia

[Spanish and Portuguese data pooled], India, Italy, Japan, Latin

America, the Netherlands, Nordic

countries [Danish, Finnish,

Norwegian and Swedish data

pooled], and USA)Democratic-participative vs. authoritarian-directive leadership were actual and ideal attitudes and behavior measured on four scales, each on a different topic: (1) use of authority in getting things done; (2) manipulation versus participation, (3) concern for the welfare of subordinates, and (4) task versus human relation concerns Heller and Wilpert (1981) 1,500 Managers in 8 countries (France,

Great Britain, (West) Germany, Israel,

Netherlands, Spain, Sweden,

and USA)The"influence-participation continuum"decision- making methods measured on a scale: from "leaders'own decision,"via"leaders decide but explain to subordinates,""leaders consult subordinates before decision-making,""joint decision-making with subordinates"to "delegation of decision-making to subordinates"

Al-Jafary and

Hollingsworth (1983)381 Managers in 4 countries in the

Arabian Gulf Region (Bahrain, Qatar,

Saudi Arabia and United Arab

Emirates) plus USAAutocratic vs. participative leadership systems using

Likert's four systems; (1) exploitative

authoritative, (2) benevolent authoritative, (3)quotesdbs_dbs1.pdfusesText_1

[PDF] exposé sur facebook en francais

[PDF] expose sur internet en francais

[PDF] exposé sur l histoire de la physique

[PDF] exposè sur l internet

[PDF] exposé sur l isolation thermique

[PDF] exposé sur l urbanisme en algerie

[PDF] exposé sur l' apartheid en anglais

[PDF] exposé sur l'amitié dans une si longue lettre

[PDF] exposé sur l'avortement pdf

[PDF] exposé sur l'eau ppt

[PDF] exposé sur l'economie marocaine ppt

[PDF] exposé sur l'économie sociale et solidaire

[PDF] exposé sur l'education au maroc ppt

[PDF] exposé sur l'égalité entre l'homme et la femme

[PDF] exposé sur l'empire du djolof