The Six Styles of Leadership Across Cultures, PART I

Do you prefer an authoritative leader or a supportive one?

Do you like a manager that allows you some autonomy or would you rather be micromanaged?

Last week, we talked about how research shows Maslow’s hierarchy of needs doesn’t stand up across cultures.

This week, we’ll discuss research that has found how management styles differ, according to a society’s values and norms.

Charismatic Leadership

Charismatic leadership was once considered the most effective.

By the ‘90s, what makes a charismatic leader and the behaviors such leaders demonstrate had undergone thorough research.

In 1991, Professor Robert J. House at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania examined studies from the Netherlands, India, Singapore, and the United States. He found that charisma was popular in a leader but certain cultures preferred other leadership styles.

His research led to GLOBE.

GLOBE

Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness is a top cross-cultural research program.

In its formative years, interviews and focus groups of 17,300 managers from 951 organizations in 59 countries by 170 investigators were conducted and gathered for this project.

What did they find?

They found that societal cultures directly influence organizational cultures.

The Six Styles of Leadership

Leadership was defined as the capacity to influence, motivate, and enable employees to contribute toward company objectives.

Six distinct leadership styles were identified by GLOBE:

• Charismatic/Value-based – a motivational and inspirational leadership style defined by charismatic, value-based leaders expecting high-performance outcomes from employees and colleagues, based on the company/organization’s core values.
• Participative – a participatory leadership style in which managers often ask the involvement of others in making decisions and implementing them.
• Team-oriented – a team-building leadership style, in which the implementation of a common goal is sought and work toward it is divided amongst team members.
• Human-oriented – an empathetic and supportive leadership style, in which modesty, generosity, compassion, and sensitivity to others are promoted.
• Autonomous – an individualistic and independent leadership style, never before appearing in business literature.
• Self-protective – a face-saving leadership style, in which the security and safety of each employee or colleague is most important, with a focus on status consciousness. Also, a new dimensional term to business literature.

This outline of distinct leadership personalities allowed GLOBE to identify what type of leadership style was preferred by different cultures. We’ll talk more about that next week.