Syed Ahad Rizvi Leadership MHR405 Chapter 9

MHR405 Chapter 9 Notes

Learning Objectives

 Define leadership and discuss the role of strategic and formal leadership in organizations.
 Explain and critically evaluate the trait theory of leadership.
 Compare and contrast the following leadership behaviours and their consequences:
consideration, initiating structure, leader reward, and leader punishment.
 Describe and evaluate the situational theories of leadership: contingency theory and path-goal
theory.
 Describe and evaluate leader-member-exchange (LMX) theory and transactional and
transformational leadership and their consequences.
 Discuss the new and emerging theories of positive leadership including empowering leadership,
ethical leadership, authentic leadership, and servant leadership.
 Describe gender differences in leadership and explain why women are underrepresented in
leadership roles in organizations.
 Discuss the GLOBE project and explain that culture pays in leadership effectiveness.
 Discuss global leadership and describe the characteristics of global leaders.

What Is Leadership?

 The influence that particular individuals exert on the goal achievement of others in an
organizational context.
 Effective leadership exerts influence in a way that achieves organizational goals by enhancing
the productivity, innovation, satisfaction, and commitment of the workforce.
 Leadership is about motivating people and gaining their commitment.
 Leadership is about motivating people and gaining their commitment.
 Leadership has a strong effect on an organization’s strategy, success, and very survival.

Strategic Leadership

 Leadership that involves the ability to anticipate, envision, maintain flexibility, think
strategically, and work with others to initiate changes that will create a viable future for the
organization.
 Strategic leaders are open and honest in their interactions with the organization’s stakeholders
and they focus on the future.
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Formal Leadership

 Individuals with titles such as manager, executive, supervisor, and department head occupy
formal or assigned leadership roles.
 They are expected to influence others and they are given specific authority to direct employees.
 Some managers and supervisors fail to exert any influence on others.
 Leadership involves going beyond formal role requirements to influence others.

Informal Leadership

 Individuals might also emerge to occupy informal leadership roles.

 Shared leadership is an emergent and dynamic team phenomenon whereby leadership roles and
influence are distributed among team members.
 Informal leaders do not have formal authority.
 They must rely on being well liked or being perceived as highly skilled to exert influence.

Are Leaders Born or Made? The Trait Theory of Leadership

 Leadership depends on the personal qualities or traits of the leader.

 Based on the assumption that those who become leaders and do a good job of it possess a
special set of traits that distinguish them from the masses of followers.

Research on Leadership Traits

 The search for leadership traits began during World War I.

 Traits are individual characteristics such as physical attributes, intellectual ability, and
personality.
 Many traits are not associated with whether people become leaders or how effective they are
as leaders.
 However, some traits are associated with leadership:
o Intelligence, Energy and drive, Self-confidence, Motivation to lead, Emotional stability,
Honesty and integrity, Need for achievement, Sociability, Need for power
 All five of the “Big Five” dimensions of personality are related to leadership emergence and
success.
 Of the “Big Five,” extraversion and conscientiousness are the most consistent predictors of
leadership effectiveness.
 Intelligence is related to leadership effectiveness; however, the relationship is lower than
previously thought.
 The relationship between traits and leadership effectiveness is stronger for affective than for
performance-related measures.
 The trait approach is not the best means of understanding and improving leadership.

Limitations of the Trait Approach

 It is difficult to determine whether traits make the leader or whether the opportunity for
leadership produces the traits.
 Does not tell us what leaders do to influence others successfully.
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 It can lead to bias and discrimination when evaluating a leader’s effectiveness and when making
decisions about promoting people to leadership positions.
 Leadership Categorization Theory:
o People are more likely to view somebody as a leader and to evaluate them as a more
effective leader when they possess prototypical characteristics of leadership.
 It is not a good idea to focus exclusively on traits when making decisions and judgements about
leadership potential and effectiveness.
 The most crucial problem is that it does not consider the situation in which leadership occurs.

Limitations of the Trait Approach: Summary

 Traits alone are not sufficient for successful leadership.

 Traits are only a precondition for certain actions that a leader must take in order to be
successful.
 Leader behaviours have a greater impact on leadership effectiveness than leader traits.

The Behaviour of Leaders

 What are the crucial behaviours leaders engage in, and how do these behaviours influence
employee performance and satisfaction?
 Is there a particular leadership style that is more effective than other styles?

Ohio State University Leadership Study

 The most involved, systematic study of leadership took place at Ohio State University in the
1940s.
 Employees described their superiors along a number of behavioural dimensions.
 The results revealed two basic kinds of behaviour:
o Consideration
 The extent to which a leader is approachable and shows personal concern and
respect for employees.
 The considerate leader is seen as friendly and egalitarian, expresses
appreciation and support, and is protective of group welfare.
o Initiating structure
 The degree to which a leader concentrates on group goal attainment.
 The structuring leader clearly defines and organizes his or her roles and the
roles of followers, stresses standard procedures, schedules the work to be done,
and assigns employees to particular tasks.
 The Consequences of Consideration and Structure
o Consideration and initiating structure are not incompatible; a leader could be high, low,
or average on one or both dimensions.
o Consideration and initiating structure both contribute positively to employees’
motivation, job satisfaction, and leader effectiveness.
o Consideration is more strongly related to follower satisfaction, motivation, and leader
effectiveness.
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o Initiating structure is slightly more strongly related to leader job performance and group
performance.
o The relative importance of consideration and initiating structure varies according to the
nature of the leadership situation.
o The Nature of the Situation:
 The effects of consideration and initiating structure depend on characteristics of
the task, the employee, and the setting in which work is performed.

Leader Reward and Punishment Behaviours

 Leader reward behaviour provides employees with compliments, tangible benefits, and
deserved special treatment.
 When such rewards are made contingent on performance, employees should perform at a high
level and experience job satisfaction.
 Leader punishment behaviour involves the use of reprimands or unfavourable task assignments
and the active withholding of raises, promotions, and other rewards.
 When punishment is perceived as random and not contingent on employee’s behaviour,
employees react negatively with great dissatisfaction.
 Research:
o Contingent leader reward and punishment behaviour is positively related to employees’
perceptions, attitudes, and behaviour.
o Non-contingent punishment behaviour is related to unfavourable outcomes.
o Relationships are much stronger when rewards and punishment are made contingent
on employee behaviour.
o The manner in which leaders administer rewards and punishment is a critical
determinant of their effectiveness.
o Leader reward and punishment behaviours are related to employees’ attitudes and
behaviours because they lead to more positive perceptions of justice and lower role
ambiguity.

Situational Theories of Leadership

 The situation refers to the setting in which influence attempts occur.

 The basic premise of situational theories of leadership is that the effectiveness of a leadership
style is contingent on the setting.
 The setting includes the characteristics of the employees, the nature of the task they are
performing, and characteristics of the organization.
 Two situational theories of leadership that are among the best known and most studied:
o Fiedler’s Contingency Theory
o House’s Path-Goal Theory
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1. Fiedler’s Contingency Theory

 Main idea: The association between leadership orientation and group effectiveness is contingent
on (depends on) the extent to which the situation is favourable for exerting influence.
 Some situations are more favourable that others, and these situations require different
orientations on the part of the leader.

Dimension 1: Leadership Orientation

 Leadership orientation is measured by having a leader describe their Least Preferred Co-Worker
(LPC).
o Least Preferred Co-Worker is a current or past co-worker with whom a leader has had a
difficult time accomplishing a task.
 The leader who describes the LPC relatively favourably (a high LPC score) is considered to be
relationship oriented.
 The leader who describes the LPC unfavourably (a low LPC score) is considered to be task
oriented.
 Fiedler has argued that the LPC score reveals a personality trait that reflects the leader’s
motivational structure.
 The LPC score is not a measure of consideration or initiating structure which are observed
behaviours.
 The LPC score is an attitude of the leader toward work relationships.

Dimension 2: Situational Favourableness

 Situational favourableness is the “contingency” part of contingency theory.

 It specifies when a particular LPC orientation should contribute most to group effectiveness.
 Factors that affect situation favourableness in order of important, are the following:
o Leader-member relations
o Task structure
o Position power
 The situation is most favourable for leadership when:
o Leader-member relations are good
o The task is structured
o The leader has strong position power
 The situation is least favourable for leadership when:
o Leader-member relations are poor
o The task is unstructured
o The leader has weak position power
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Fiedler’s Contingency Theory (Cont’d)

 The model indicates that a task orientation (low LPC) is most effective when the leadership
situation is very favourable or when it is very unfavourable.
 A relationship orientation (high LPC) is most effective in conditions of medium favourability.

Contingency Theory: Research Evidence

 Contingency theory has been the subject of much debate.

 The exact meaning of the LPC score is not clear.
 A major source of the many inconsistent findings is the small sample sizes used in many studies.
 Recent reviews have concluded that there is reasonable support for contingency theory.

2. House’s Path-Goal Theory

 Robert House’s theory is concerned with the situations under which various leader behaviours
are most effective.
 Path-Goal Theory is concerned with leader behaviours.
 Why did House choose the name “path-goal” for his theory?
 The most important activities of leaders are those that clarify the paths to various goals of
interest to employees.
 The opportunity to achieve such goals should promote job satisfaction, leader acceptance, and
high effort.
 The effective leader forms a connection between employee goals and organizational goals.
 To achieve job satisfaction and leader acceptance, leader behaviour must be perceived as
immediately satisfying or as leading to future satisfaction.
 To promote employee effort, leaders must make rewards dependent on performance and ensure
that employees have a clear picture of how they can achieve these rewards.
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Leader Behaviour

 Path-Goal Theory is concerned with four specific kinds of leader behaviour:

o Directive behaviour (follow GPS direction from here to Ottawa)
 Directive leaders schedule work, maintain performance standards, and let
employees know what is expected of them. Identical to initiating structure
o Supportive behaviour (Give me a call if you need directions)
 Supportive leaders are friendly, approachable, and concerned with pleasant
interpersonal relationships. Identical to consideration.
o Participating behaviour (I will be in the car with you and we’ll navigate together)
 Participative leaders consult with employees about work-related matters and
consider their opinions.
o Achievement-oriented behaviour (Go to Ottawa, I’m sure you know how to)
 Achievement-oriented leaders encourage employees to exert high effort and
strive for a high level of goal accomplishment. They express confidence that
employees can reach these goals.

Situational Factors

 The effectiveness of each set of behaviours depends on the situation that the leader encounters.
 Path-Goal Theory is concerned with two primary classes of situational factors:
o 1. Employee Characteristics
 Different types of employees need or prefer different forms of leadership:
 High need achievers should work well under achievement-oriented
leadership.
 Employees who prefer to be told what to do respond best to directive
leadership.
 When employees have low task abilities, they will appreciate directive
leadership.
o 2. Environmental (job) factors
 The effectiveness of leadership behaviour depends on the particular work
environment:
 When tasks are clear and routine, directive leadership is redundant and
unnecessary and participative leadership is not useful.
 When tasks are challenging but ambiguous, directive and participative
leadership is effective.
 When a job is frustrating or dissatisfying, supportive leadership is most
effective.
 The impact of leader behaviour on employee satisfaction, effort, and acceptance of the leader
depends on the nature of the employees and the work environment.
 Leaders might have to tailor their behaviour to the needs, abilities, and personalities of individual
employees.
 Effective leaders should take advantage of the motivating and satisfying aspects of jobs while
offsetting or compensating for those job aspects that demotivate or dissatisfy.
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Path-Goal Theory: Research Evidence

 There is substantial evidence that supportive or considerate leader behaviour is most beneficial
in supervising routine, frustrating, or dissatisfying jobs.
 There is some evidence that directive or structing leader behaviour is most effective on
ambiguous, less-structured jobs.
 The theory works better in predicting employees’ job satisfaction and acceptance of the leader
than in predicting job performance.

Participative Leadership: Involving Employees in Decisions

 Participative leadership is one of the leader behaviours in the path-goal theory.

 It is an important leadership style and deserves further attention.

What is Participative Leadership?

 Participative leadership means involving employees in making work-related decisions.

 Leaders can vary in the extent to which they involve employees in decision making.
 Minimally, participation involves obtaining employee opinions before deciding.
 Maximally, it allows employees to make their own decisions within agreed-on limits.
 Participation can involve individual employees or the entire group of employees that reports to
the leader.
 The choice of an individual or group participation strategy should be tailored to specific situations.

Potential Advantages of Participative Leadership

 What are the potential advantages of participation as a leadership technique?

o Motivation
 Participation can increase the motivation of employees.
 Participation can permit employees to contribute to the establishment of work
goals and how to accomplish them.
 Participation can increase intrinsic motivation by enriching job.
o Quality
 Participation can enhance the quality of decisions.
 “Two heads are better than one.”
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 Participation can also enhance quality because it empowers employees, who

have first hand experiences with the problem, to take direct action and solve
problems.
o Acceptance
 Participation can increase employees’ acceptance of decisions.
 They own the decision.
 This is especially important when issues of fairness are involved.

Potential Problems of Participative Leadership

 What are the potential problems of participation as a leadership technique?

o Time and energy
 Participation requires specific behaviours on the part of the leader that use time
and energy.
o Loss of power
 Some leaders feel that a participative style will reduce their power and
influence.
 Sometimes leaders respond by asking employees to make trivial decisions.

o Lack of receptivity or knowledge

 Employees might not be receptive to participation when the leader is not
trusted or when a poor labour climate exists.
 Employees might lack the knowledge to contribute effectively to decisions and
might not be aware of external constraints on their decisions.

Participative Leadership: Research Evidence

 There is substantial evidence that employees who have the opportunity to participate in work-
related decisions report more job satisfaction, higher task performance, and organizational
citizenship behaviour toward the organization than those who do not.
 These results are partly due to a positive effect on employee empowerment and trust in one’s
supervisor.
 Most workers seem to prefer a participative work environment.
 However, for participation to be translated into higher productivity, certain facilitating
conditions must exist.
 When will participation work best?

Conditions for Participation

 Participation should work best when:

o Employees feel favourably toward it.
o Employees are intelligent and knowledgeable about the issue at hand.
o When the task is complex enough to make participation useful.
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Leader-Member Exchange (LMX) Theory

 A theory of leadership that focuses on the relationship that develops between a leader and an
employee.
 It is a social exchange relationship-based approach to leadership.
 Effective leadership processes result when leaders and employees develop and maintain high-
quality social exchange relationships.
 The variability in the quality of LMX relationships between members of the same workgroup is
called LMX differentiation
o The basis for the effects of LMX on employees is social exchange theory and the norm of
reciprocity.
 High LMX involves a high degree of mutual influence and obligation as well as trust, loyalty,
open communication, and respect between a leader and an employee.
 In high-quality relationships, employees perform tasks beyond their job descriptions.
 Low LMX is characterized by low trust, respect, obligation, and mutual support.
 In low-quality relationships, the leader provides less attention and latitude to employees.
 Employees do only what their job descriptions and formal role requirements demand of them.

Social Exchange Theory

 Individuals who are treated favourably by others feel obliged to reciprocate by responding
positively and returning that favourable treatment in some manner.
 Employees in a high-quality relationship with their supervisor will reciprocate with extra effort
and higher commitment and performance.

Leader-Member Exchange (LMX) Theory: Research Evidence

 Employees with higher quality LMX have higher self-efficacy, more positive work attitudes, and
higher OCB, job performance, creativity, and career outcomes.
 The relationship between LMX and performance and OCB is primarily due to greater levels of
trust.
 Higher-quality LMX relationships result in positive outcomes for leaders, employees, work units,
and organization.
 Greater LMX differentiation can be detrimental to group harmony and processes which can
harmful to group performance.
 Leaders should try to develop fair and high-quality relationships with all of their employees.

Transactional Leadership

 Transactional leadership is leadership that is based on a straightforward exchange relationship

between a leader and followers.
 Transactional leadership behaviour involves:
o Contingent reward behaviour (leader reward behaviour)
o Management by exception
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 Management by Exception
o Leadership that involves the leader taking corrective action on the basis of the result of
leader-follower transactions.
o The leader monitors behaviour, anticipates problems, and takes corrective actions
before the behaviour creates serious problems.

Transformational Leadership

 Transformational leadership is leadership that provides followers with a new vision that instills
true commitment.
 Transformational leaders change the beliefs and attitudes of followers to correspond with a new
vision and motivates them to achieve performance beyond expectation.

Transformational Leaders

 Popular examples of transformational leaders: Herb Kelleher, Michael Eisner, Steven Jobs, Carly
Fiorina, and Coach Boon.
 Transformational leaders are usually good at the transactional aspect of clarifying the paths to
goals and rewarding goo performance.
 What are the behaviours of transformational leaders who encourage considerable effort and
dedication on the part of followers?

Behaviours of Transformational Leadership

 There are four key dimensions of transformational behaviour:

o Intellectual stimulation
 People are stimulated to think about problems, issues, and strategies in new
ways.
 This contributes to the “new version” aspect of transformational leadership.
 The leader challenges assumptions, takes risks, and solicits followers’ ideas.
 It often involves creativity and novelty.
o Individualized consideration
 This involves treating employees as distinct individuals, indicating concern for
their needs and personal development, and serving as a mentor or coach when
appropriate.
 The emphasis is a one-on-one attempt to meet the concerns and needs of the
individual in question in the context of the overall goal or mission.
o Inspirational motivation
 This involves the communication of visions that are appealing and inspiring to
followers.
 Leaders with inspirational motivation have a strong vision for the future based
on values and ideals.
 They stimulate enthusiasm, challenge followers with high standards,
communicate optimism about future goal attainment, and provide meaning for
the task at hand.
 They inspire followers using symbolic actions and persuasion.
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o Charisma
 The ability to command strong loyalty and devotion from followers and this
have the potential for strong influence among them.
 This is the most important aspect of transformational leadership.
 Charisma provides the emotional aspect of transformational leadership.
 The emergence of charisma is a complex function of traits, behaviours, and
being in the right place at the right time.

Transformational Leadership: Research Evidence

 Transformational leadership is strongly related to follower motivation, work engagement,

satisfaction, organizational commitment, leader performance, leader effectiveness, and
individual, group, and organization performance.
 Charismatic leadership has also been found to be strongly related to follower satisfaction and
leadership effectiveness.
 Compared to other forms of leader behaviour, transformational leadership has been found to be
the most consistent predictor of effective leadership.
 Some evidence that CEO transformational leadership is positively related to firm performance,
especially when the environment is uncertain.
 Transformational leadership is especially effective during times of change and for obtaining
employees’ commitment to change.
 Overall, the best leaders are both transformational and transactional.

New and Emerging Theories of Positive Leadership

 Leadership research has begun to focus on new styles of leadership that emphasize ethical and
morel leader behaviour.
 These new forms of leadership represent what has been described as positive leadership.
 Positive leadership focuses on leader behaviours and interpersonal dynamics that increase
followers’ confidence and result in positive outcomes and include:
o Empowering leadership (sharing power and participating)
 Empowering leadership involves implementing conditions that enable power to
be shared with employees.
 Empowering leaders provide participation and autonomy in decision making.
 Employees experience a state of psychological empowerment that consists of
feelings of meaning, competence, self-determination, and impact.
 Empowering leadership provides employees with a greater feeling of control
over their work and a sense that they can make a difference in their
organization’s effectiveness.
 Empowering leadership has been found to be positively related to high self-
efficacy and adaptability, job performance, and creativity relevant behaviours.
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o Ethical leadership (showing and promoting normatively appropriate behaviour, e.g.

honesty)
 Ethical leadership involves the demonstration of normatively appropriate
conduct through personal action and interpersonal relationships, and the
promotion of such conduct to followers through two-way communication,
reinforcement, and decision-making.
 What do ethical leaders so?
 They model what is deemed to be normatively appropriate behaviour.
 They make ethics salient in the workplace, set ethical standards, and reward
ethical behaviour.
 They discipline those who don’t follow ethical standards and punish unethical
behaviour.
 Ethical leaders consider the ethical consequences of their decisions.
 They care about people and the broader society and seek to do the right thing
personally and professionally.
 Ethical leadership is positively related to more favourable evaluation of leaders,
more positive job attitudes, and greater performance. And work engagement.
 It is negatively related to job stress and strains, turnover intentions, and
counterproductive work.
 The relationship between ethical leadership and positive work outcomes is due
to trust in the leader.
 Ethical leadership has also been found to be positively related to employees’
psychological well-being and group ethical voice.
 The ethical behaviour of leaders has a significant influence on the ethical culture
of an organization.
 The ethical leadership of immediate supervisors is likely to have the greatest
effect on employees.
o Authentic leadership (knowing and acting upon one’s true values, beliefs, and strengths,
and helping others do the same.
 Authentic leadership is a positive form of leadership that involves being true to
oneself.
 Authentic leaders know and act upon their true values, beliefs, and strengths,
and they help others do the same.
 Their conduct and behaviour is guided by their internal values.
 Authentic leadership consists of four related but distinct behaviours:
 Self-awareness – An accurate understanding of one’s strengths and
weaknesses and an awareness of one’s impact on others.
 Rational transparency – The presenting of one’s true or authentic self to
others and the open sharing of information and expressions of one’s
true thoughts and feelings.
 Balance processing – The objective analysis of all relevant information
before deciding and consideration of views that challenge one’s own
position.
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 Internalized moral perspective – They have moral standards and values

that guide their behaviour and decision making.
 Followers of authentic leaders have higher:
 Trust in their leader
 Organizational commitment
 Job satisfaction
 Satisfaction with their supervisor
 Organizational citizenship behaviour
 Work engagement
 Ethical and pro-social behaviours
 Authentic leadership has been found to be positively related to the
psychological capital of work groups and trust among group members which led
to higher group citizenship behaviours and performance.
 Team leader authenticity has also been found to be related to team members’
authenticity which was related to higher quality teamwork behaviour and team
productivity.
o Servant leadership
 Servant leadership is a form of leadership that involves going beyond one’s own
self-interests and having a genuine concern to serve others and a motivation to
lead.
 The focus of servant leadership is a concern for the needs of followers and their
growth and development.
 A servant leader is somebody who wants to serve first and lead second.
 There are six characteristics of servant leaders:
 Empowering and developing people
 Humility
 Authenticity
 Interpersonal acceptance
 Providing direction
 Stewardship
 Servant leadership is positively related to trust in management and perceptions
of organizational justice as well as more positive work attitudes, work
engagement, and high OCBs.
 Employees in departments that had servant leaders were found to have higher
perceptions of being treated fairly and were more likely to exhibit helping
behaviours.

Gender and Leadership

 Do men and women adopt different leadership styles?

 Women tend to be more participative or democratic than men.
 Women leaders have been found to be more transformational than men leaders, and to also
engage in more of the contingent reward behaviours of transactional leadership.
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 Men leaders engaged in more management by exception and laissez-faire leadership which is a
passive form of leadership that involves avoidance or absence of leadership and is negatively
related to leader effectiveness.
 These findings attest to the ability of women to be highly effective leaders.
 So, do men and women differ in leadership effectiveness?
 A review of 95 studies found that there are some differences in certain situations such as
whether an organization is male or female dominated.
 Men are perceived as more effective in organizations that are masculine and male dominated;
women are perceived as more effective in organizations that are feminine and female-
dominated.
 When these factors are considered, men and women do not differ in perceived leadership
effectiveness.

Woman and Leadership

 Women hold very few top leadership positions in Canadian organizations.

 Among the top 500 companies in the world, only three percent have female CEOs.
 Women also hold a minority of senior leadership positions in the United Stated and Europe.
 How can we explain this obvious gender bias in leadership?
 For decades the explanation has been the glass ceiling metaphor, the invisible barrier that
prevents women from advancing to senior leadership positions in organizations.
 According to Alice Eagly and Linda Carli, a more accurate metaphor is a labyrinth because of the
many twists, turns, detours, and dead ends that women encounter along their way up the
organizational hierarchy.
 It is the sum of all the barriers women face rather than one particular barrier.
 It can also be explained by role congruity theory (RCT).
 What can organizations do to increase the number of women in senior leadership positions?
 A combination of programs and interventions is required such as reducing the subjectivity of
performance evaluations and establishing family friendly human resource practices.

Role Congruity Theory

 Prejudice against female leaders is the result of an incongruity between the perceived
requirements of leadership roles.
 Leaders are perceived as similar to men and not very similar to women.
 Men are perceived as having agentic traits while women are perceived as having communal
traits.
 Agentic and Communal Traits
o Men are perceived as having agentic traits, which convey assertion and control and are
generally associated with effective leadership.
o Women are perceived as having communal traits, which convey a concern for the
compassionate treatment of others.
o Males, but not females, are perceived as having traits that are associated with
leadership.
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Culture and Leadership

 Are leadership styles equally effective across cultures?

 The Global Leadership and Organizational Behaviour Effectiveness (GLOBE) research project is
the most extensive and ambitious study ever undertaken on global leadership.

The GLOBE Project

 Identified nine cultural dimensions that distinguish one society from another.
 Based on these cultural dimensions, they identified 10 culture clusters.
o The culture clusters differ with respect to how they score on the nine cultural
dimensions.
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 GLOBE wanted to know if the same attributes that lead to successful leadership in once country
lead to success in other countries.
 Citizens in each nation have implicit assumptions regarding requisite leadership qualities,
something known as implicit leadership theory.
 Implicit Leadership Theory
o A theory that states that individuals hold a set of beliefs about the kinds of attributes,
personality characteristics, skills, and behaviours that contribute to or impede
outstanding leadership.
o Culturally endorsed implicit leadership theory (CLT) refers to belief systems that are
shared among individuals in common cultures.
 Global Leadership Dimensions
o Global leadership dimensions that are contributors to or inhibitors of outstanding
leadership:
 Charismatic/Value-based, team-oriented, participative, humane-oriented,
autonomous, self-protective.
o Leadership problems for each national culture and clusters of cultures were created
based on scored on the six global leadership dimensions.
o Cultures and clusters differ significantly on all six of the global leadership dimensions.
o Canada and the U.S. score high on the charismatic/value-based, participative, and
human-oriented dimensions, and low on the self-protective dimension, and medium on
the team-oriented and autonomous decisions.
Syed Ahad Rizvi Leadership MHR405 Chapter 9

 Leader Attributes
o Many leader attributes such as being honest, decisive, motivational, and dynamic were
found to be universally desirable and believed to facilitate outstanding leadership in all
GLOBE countries.
o Some leader attributes such as being loners, irritable, egocentric, and ruthless are
ineffective in all GLOBE countries.
o Some attributes are culturally contingent – they are effective in some cultures but are
either ineffective or dysfunctional in others.

 The results of the GLOBE project show that while there are similarities across cultures in terms
of what are considered to be desirable and undesirable leadership attributes, there are also
important differences.
 Managers need to understand the similarities and differences in what makes someone an
effective leader across cultures if they are to be effective global leaders.

Globe Leadership

 Global leadership involves having leadership capabilities required to function effectively in

different cultures and the ability to cross language, social, economic, and political borders.
 The essence of global leadership is the ability to influence people who are not like the leader
and come from different cultural backgrounds.
 Global leaders need to have a global mindset, tolerate high levels of ambiguity, and exhibit
cultural adaptability and flexibility.
 Global leaders have four characteristics:
o Unbridled inquisitiveness
 Global leaders must be able to function effectively in different cultures in which
they are required to cross language, social, economic, and political borders.
 They relish the opportunity to see and experience new things.
o Personal character
 This involves an emotional connection to people from different cultures and
uncompromising integrity.
Syed Ahad Rizvi Leadership MHR405 Chapter 9

o Duality
 Duality means that global leaders must be able to manage uncertainty and
balance global and local tensions.
o Savvy
 Global leaders need to have business and organization savvy.
 They need to understand the conditions they face in different countries and be
informed of their organization’s capabilities and international ventures.
 Individuals with the potential to become global leaders:
o Have experience working of living in different cultures.
o Speak more than one language.
o Have an aptitude for global business.
 Becoming an effective global leader requires extensive training that consists of:
o Travel to foreign countries
o Teamwork with members of diverse backgrounds
o Formal training programs
o Transfer and overseas assignments
 Long-term international assignments are considered to be especially effective.
 Many organizations do not have enough global leaders now or for the future and they do not
have a system in place for developing them.
 Certain countries produce more global leaders than others.
 Countries that are considered to be the most global in terms of their involvement in the world
trade and investment such as Canada, tend to produce more global leaders than others given
their size.
 They are middle-economy countries that are dependent on foreign trade.
 Living in a multicultural environment like Canada is excellent preparation for becoming a global
manager.

What Style of Leadership Is Best?

 An effective leader needs to be capable of using different styles of leadership.

 The key issue is knowing what style of leadership is required in each situation that a leader
encounters.
 Key situation variables include the nature of the task, employee characteristics, characteristics
of the organization, and national culture.
 Leadership will be effective when the leadership style is matched to the situation.