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I. Motivation and leadership are factors in the successful implementation of desired strategy. But while many of the basic principles are universal, much of the actual content and process is culture-contingent - a function of an individual's needs, value systems, and environmental context.
2. One problem in using content theories, such as those created by Maslow and Herzberg, for cross-cultural research is the assumption of their universal application. Because they were developed in the United States, even the concepts, such as achievement or esteem, may have different meanings in other societies, resulting in a noncom parable basis of research.
3. Implicit in motivating an employee is an understanding of which of the employee's needs arc satisfied by work. Studies on the “meaning of work” indicate considerable cross-cultural differences.
4. Other studies on cross-cultural motivation support Herzberg's two-factor theory. They also indicate, as do studies using Maslow's theory, support for the greater importance of intrinsic factors to motivation, at least on the managerial level. One problem with Herzberg's theory is that it does not account for all relevant cultural variables.
5. A reexamination of motivation relative to Hofstede's dimensions of power distance,
uncertainty avoidance, individualism, and masculinity provides another perspective on the cultural contexts that can influence motivational structures.
6. Incentives and reward systems must be designed to reflect the motivational structure and relative cultural emphasis on five categories of rewards: financial, social status, job content, career, and professional.
7. Effective leadership is crucial to the ability of a company to achieve its goals. The challenge is to decide what is effective leadership in different international or mixed-culture situations.
8. The perception of what makes a good leader - both traits and behaviors - varies a great deal from one society to another.
9. Contingency theory is applicable to cross- cultural leadership situations because of the vast number of cultural and national variables that can affect the dynamics of the leadership context. These include leader - subordinate and group relations, which are affected by cultural expectations, values, needs, attitudes, perceptions of risk, and loci of control.
10. Joint ventures with other countries present a common but complex situation in which leaders must work together to anticipate and address cross-cultural problems.
Because leadership and motivation entail constant interactions with others (employees, peers, superiors, outside contacts), ultural influences on these critical management functions are very strong. Certainly, other powerful variables are intricately involved in the international management context, particularly those of economics and politics. Effective leaders carefully examine the entire context and develop a sensitivity to others' values and expectations regarding personal and group interactions, performance, and outcomes - and then act accordingly.
Many subtle effects of the caste system stilt remain and affect life in organizations in the form of a strict adherence to hierarchy. Indians are disposed to structure all relationships hierarchically; for this reason they usually work better individually than in groups. Management in India is often autocratic, based on formal authority and charisma. Family norms emphasizing loyalty to the family authority figure underlie the limited decision-making experience and unfa- miliarity with responsibility found in some employees. Consequently, decision making is centralized, with much emphasis on rules and a low propensity for risk. In addition, intricate family ties and strong authority figures perpetuate a managerial style of paternalism.
Under the pervasive influences of religion, caste, and family on the life of the Hindu, the Indian culture stresses moral orientation and loyalty as in the pursuit of dharma, one's obligation to society, rather than personal goals. Work tends to be viewed primarily in the context of family or interacts relationships, rather than being valued for itself.80 Nepotism is common both at the lowest and highest levels. Unsurprisingly power based on expertise frequently takes a back seat to power based on position.81 Generally American managers in India need to make connections with the right families, make contact at the highest levels, and provide incentives for middle managers and assistants to help nudge proposals upward.
On the micro level of leadership - manager to employees - American managers in India are wise to tread slowly while trying to understand the culture and find what works. Various proposals have been put forward to help Managers move toward more effective leadership. Tripathi suggests that “indigenous values, such as families, need to be synthesized with the values of industrial democracy.” Similarly, Sinha proposes that, while a leader in India has to be a “nurturant,” taking a personal interest in the well-being of each subordinate; he or she can use that nurturance to encourage increasing levels of participation. The manager may accomplish this by guiding and directing subordinates to work hard and maintain a high level of productivity, reinforcing each stage with increased nurturance.84 According to Sinha and Sinha, a prerequisite to effective cross-cultural leadership in India is to establish work as the “master value.” Once this is done, “other social values will reorganize themselves to help realize the master value.”
Multiple problems abound on the macro level of leadership of a global enterprise in India, as discovered by companies such as Gillette, Rank Xerox, Texas Instruments, and Hewlett-Packard. Investment opportunities are very attractive, with a potential for great sales and a pool of cheap, highly educated, and skilled labor. But, even after getting through the entrenched bureaucracy to set up business, managers may face many operating problems because of the undeveloped infrastructure and difficult climate. Gaining control and integrating leadership styles with local managers are additional hurdles. American managers, used to being boss in their own companies, may have difficulty taking orders from Indian partners and prefer to operate at a faster pace. Gill, of Gillette, suggests, “You've got to find the right partner and convince him to give you complete management control.” Failure to include an Indian partner or to build local support was behind the cancellation of Enron's $2.8 billion power project in Dhabol, as part of a resurgence of ecofiomic nationalism in India in 1995 pending national elections. The project was reinstated in 1999; but as of 2001, problems between Enron and the Indian government continued and Enron decided not to build more plants in India. In other areas, such as telecommunications, liberalization is progressing well, to the benefit of companies such as AT&T, Motorola, and Texas Instruments (TI). It is noteworthy that these companies have Indian joint-venture partners and Indian CEOs. TI India's managing director, Srini Rajam, noted that the Bagalore plant was responsible for one-third of TI's design automation for semiconductor products wordwide.
India is expected to be an economic giant someday. Meanwhile, American managers must realize that setting up and running a successful business in India requires astute leadership skills, including integrating and collaborating at all levels of the community for the long term.
Saddam Hussein during the 1991 Gulf War. Underlying these styles - and the misunderstandings that persist between Arabs and the West - are many cultural and national factors (including differences in religion, logic, and ideas about truth, freedom, honor, trust, family, and friends) Most of these factors are based on elements of Arab history that Westerners find difficult to comprehend. Arabs tend to use the past as their basis of reference, whereas Americans look to the future.
Prom various accounts, Hussein thinks that his strong leadership means the fulfillment of destiny: Iraq was meant to be the dominant power in the region. Others, however, attest to his use of internal power for personal aggrandizement. His leadership style is, obviously, dictatorial, and to most people in the world he seems a ruthless tyrant and a master of manipulation. However, he is seen as a hero by most Iraqis and by many other Arabs in the region. Participation and delegation in decision making are clearly not among his leadership behaviors, nor is he likely to seek consensus even on radical plans. In contrast, most Western leaders quietly go about team building - consulting widely and building consensus around whatever action they feel should be taken. After Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, President Bush took time to build strong support behind the scenes, forging a powerful alliance among Arabs, Israelis, Europeans, Japanese, Chinese, and Soviets. Based on continued support, President Clinton ordered further attacks on Iraq in 1998 - 99 after Iraq's lack of compliance with agreements made in 1990, and President George W. Bush followed suit in 2001, keeping up to pressure for compliance.
The effects of participative leadership can vary even in one location when the employees are from different cultural backgrounds - from which we can conclude that a subordinate's culture is usually a more powerful variable than other factors in the environment. Research that supports this conclusion includes a study conducted in Saudi Arabia that found participative leadership to be more effective with American workers than with Asian and African employees, and a study in a U.S. plant that found that participative leadership resulted in greater satisfaction and communication in American employees than in Mexican employees.
In Exhibit 10-9 we depict our integrative model of the leadership process by pulling together the variables described in this book and in the research on culture, leadership, and motivation. It shows the powerful contingency of culture as it affects the leadership role. Reading from left to right, it covers the broad environmental factors through to the outcomes affected by the entire leadership situation. As shown in the exhibit, the broad context in which the manager operates necessitates adjustments in leadership style to all those variables relating to the work and task environment and the people involved. Cultural variables (values, work norms, the locus of control, and so forth), as they affect everyone involved - leader, subordinates, and work groups - then shape the content of the immediate leadership situation.
The leader - follower interaction is then further shaped by the leader's choice of behaviors (autocratic, participative, and so on) and the employees' attitudes toward the leader and the incentives. Motivation effects - various levels of effort, performance, and satisfaction - result from these interactions, on an individual and a group level. These effects determine the outcomes for the company (productivity, quality) and for the employees (satisfaction, positive climate). The results and rewards from those outcomes then act as food back (positive or negative) into the cycle of the motivation and leadership process.
Clearly, then, international managers should take seriously the culture contingency in their application of the contingency theory of leadership: They must adjust their leadership behaviors according to the context, norms, attitudes, and other variables in that society One example of the complexity of the leadership situation involving obvious contextual as well as cultural factors can be seen from the results of a study of how Russian employees responded to participative management practices of North American managers. It was found that the performance of the Russian workers decreased, which the researchers attributed to a his-
tory of employee ideas being ignored by Russian managers, as well as cultural value differences. To gain more insight into comparative leadership situations, the following Comparative Management in Focus highlights the leadership context in India, along with the implications for appropriate leadership by expatriates. The most effective leadership style in India would thus combine
integrity, being organized, an action orientation, being a self starter,
charisma, and a collective orientation; with being a problem solver, a
visionary, entrepreneurial, and inspirational, in that order.
Recent research on culturally-contingent leadership behaviors was conducted in 62 countries with 8,000 managers by 170 researchers who made up the GLOBE leadership research project, led by Robert House. Following is a small sample of their findings. Those leadership styles and behaviors that were found to be culturally contingent are; charismatic, team-oriented, self-protective, participative, humane, and autonomous. The charismatic leader as in this research is someone who is, for example, a visionary, an inspiration to subordinates, and performance- oriented. Although charisma was ranked as important to leaders everywhere, those countries where it seemed to be most important were Israel, the Philippines, Canada, Australia, and the United States, for example. The managers in those countries where team orientation was regarded as very important for leaders were in Greece, Brazil, Turkey, and Argentina, although the ratings were all quite high and close together. The self-protective dimension describes a leader who is self-centered, conflictual and status conscious. Not surprisingly, the ratings were generally lower than the previous two dimensions mentioned although managers in some countries - for example, Albania, Egypt, Indonesia, and Taiwan - thought those attributes of leaders were fairly important to facilitate leadership (scores more than 4.0 on a 1 - 7 point scale). The lowest scores were found in the Nordic countries. The participative leader was deemed to be most important (out of the 62 countries researched) in Austria, Brazil, and Canada, while those countries in which those behaviors were deemed the least important compared with the others were Russia, Mexico, and Taiwan. An autonomous leader is, as expected, an individualist, so countries that ranked participation as important tended to rank autonomy in leadership as relatively unimportant. Humane leaders are compassionate to their employees. Most ratings on that dimension were fairly high, with the highest being South Africa (white sample), India, the Philippines, and Malaysia. The lower scores were from Finland, western Germany, Italy, Russia, and Morocco.
Clearly, this path-breaking research can be very helpful to managers going abroad to enable them to develop a culturally-appropriate profile of requisite leadership skills and to exercise them accordingly.
Expectations about managerial authority versus participation were also among the managerial behaviors and philosophies studied by Laurent, a French researched In a study conducted in nine Western European countries, the United States, Indonesia, and Japan, he concluded that national origin significantly affects the perception of what is effective management.6 For example, Americans and Germans subscribe more to participation than do Italians and Japanese; Indonesians are more comfortable with a strict autocratic structure. Managers in Sweden, the Netherlands, the United States, Denmark, and Great Britain believe that employees should participate in problem solving rather than simply be “fed” all the answers by managers, compared with managers in those countries on the higher end of this scale, such as Italy, Indonesia, and Japan. Laurent's findings about Japan, however, seem to contradict common knowledge about Japan's very participative decision-making culture. In fact, research by Hampers-Turner and Trompenaars places Japan as second highest, after Sweden, in the extent to which leaders delegate authority.68 Findings regarding the other countries are similar, as shown in Exhibit 10-7. However, participative leadership should not mean a lack of initiative or responsibility.
Other classic studies indicate cross-cultural differences in the expectations of leadership behavior. Haired, Giselle, and Porter surveyed over three thousand managers in 14 countries. They found that, although managers around the world consistently favored delegation and participation, those managers also had a low appreciation of the capacity and willingness of subordinates to take an active role in the management process.
In addition, several studies of individual countries or areas conclude that a participative leadership style is frequently inappropriate. Managers in Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and the Plulippines were found to prefer autocratic leadership, whereas those in Singapore and Hong Kong are less autocratic. Similarly, the Turks have been found to prefer authoritarian leadership, as do the Thais.
In the Middle East, in particular, there is little delegation. A successful company must have strong managers who make all the decisions and who go unquestioned; much emphasis is placed on the use of power through social contacts and family influence, and the chain of command must be rigidly followed. A comparison of these and other management dimensions between Middle Eastern and Western managers is shown in Exhibit 10-8.
These stereotypical extremes of Middle Eastern and Western leadership styles were exemplified at the highest level by President George Bush and President
Modern leadership theory recognizes that no single leadership style works well in all situations. A considerable amount of research, directly or indirectly, supports the notion of cultural contingency in leadership. Much of this research also provides insight on the relative level of preference for autocratic versus participative leadership styles. For example, Hofstadter's four cultural dimensions (discussed in Chapter 3. provide a good starting point to study leader - subordinate expectations and relationships. We can assume, for example, that employees in countries that rank high on power distance (India, Mexico, the Philippines) are more likely to prefer an autocratic leadership style and some paternalism because they are more comfortable with a clear distinction between managers and subordinates rather than with a blurring of decision-making responsibility.
Employees in countries that rank low on power distance (Sweden and Israel) are more likely to prefer a consultative, participative leadership style, and they
expect superiors to adhere to that style. Hofstadter, in fact, concludes that the participative management approaches recommended by many American re searcher can be counterproductive in certain cultures.
Numerous leadership theories variously focus on individual traits, leader behavior, interaction patterns, role relationships, follower perceptions, influence over followers, influence on task goals, and influence on organizational culture. Our task in this chapter is to understand how the variable of societal culture fits into these theories and what implications can be drawn for international managers as they seek to provide leadership around the world. While the functions of leadership are similar across cultures, anthropological studies, such as those by Mead, indicate that leadership is a universal phenomenon and that effective leadership varies across cultures.
In addition to research studies that indicate variations in leadership profiles, the generally accepted image that people in different countries have about what they expect and admire in their leaders tends to become a norm over time, forming an idealized role for these leaders. Industry leaders in France and Italy, for example, are highly regarded for their social prominence and political power. In Latin American countries, leaders are respected as the total person and leaders in society, with appreciation for the arts being important. In Germany, polish, decisiveness, and a wide general knowledge are respected, with their leaders granted a lot of formality by everyone. Foreigners are often surprised at the informal off- the-job lifestyles of executives in the United States and would be surprised to see them pushing a lawn mower for example.
Most research on American leadership styles describes managerial behaviors on, essentially, the same dimension, variously termed autocratic versus democratic, participative versus directive, relations-or tented versus task-oriented, or initiating structure versus consideration continuum.602 These studies were developed in the West, and conclusions regarding employee responses largely reflect the opinions of American workers. The democratic, or participative, leadership style has been recommended as the one more likely to have positive results with most American employees.
An additional factor - that of technology - is becoming increasingly pervasive in its ability to influence the global leader's role and environment, and perhaps will contribute to a lessening of the differences in motivation and leadership around the world. More and more often, companies like Italtel spa, featured in the accompanying E-Biz Box, are using technology in global leadership techniques to set up systems for their geographically dispersed employees to enable them to expand and coordinate their global operations. In the case of Italtel, this required wide delegation and empowerment of their employees so that they could decentralize.
The greatest competitive advantage global companies in the twenty-first century can have is effective global leaders. Yet this competitive challenge is not easy to meet. People tend to rise to leadership positions by proving themselves able to lead in their home-country corporate culture and meeting the generally accepted behaviors of that national culture. However, global leaders must broaden their horizons, both strategically and cross-culturally, and develop a more flexible model of leadership that can be applied anywhere - one that is adaptable to location situations around the world. From their recent research involving 125 global leaders in 50 companies, Morrison, Gregersen, and Black concluded that effective leaders must have global business and organizational savvy- They explain global business savvy as the ability to recognize global market opportunities for their company and having a vision of doing business worldwide. Global organizational savvy requires an intimate knowledge of the company's resources and capabilities in order to capture global markets; to understand each subsidiary's product lines and how the people and business operates on the local level. Morrison, Gregersen, and Black outline four personal development strategies through which companies and managers can meet these requirements of effective global leadership: travel, teamwork, training, and transfers (the four its).
Travel, of course, exposes managers to various cultures, economies, political systems and markets. Working on global teams teaches managers to operate on an interpersonal level while dealing with business decision-making processes which are embraced by differences in cultural norms and business models. While formal training seminars also play an important role, most of the global leaders interviewed said that the most influential developmental experience in their lives was the international assignment. In fact, increasingly global companies are requiring that their managers have overseas assignment experience in order to progress to top management positions. Of course, the benefits accruing to the organization depend on how effectively the assignment and repatriation is handled, as discussed in Chapter 9.
Effective global leadership involves the ability to inspire and influence the thinking, attitudes, and behavior of people anywhere in that world. The importance of the leadership role cannot be overemphasized because the leader's interactions strongly influence the motivation and behavior of employees, and ultimately, the entire climate of the organization. The cumulative effects of one or more weak managers can have a significant negative impact on the ability of the organization to meet its objectives.
Managers on international assignments try to maximize leadership effectiveness by juggling several important, and sometimes conflicting, roles as (1. a representative of the parent firm, (2. the manager of the local firm, (3. a resident of the local community, (4. a citizen of either the host country or of another country, (5. a member of a profession, and (6. a member of a family.
The leader's role comprises the interaction of two sets of variables - the content and the context of leadership. The content of leadership comprises the attributes of the leader and the decisions to be made; the context of leadership comprises all those variables related to the particular situation. The increased number of variables (political, economic, and cultural) in the context of the managerial job abroad requires astute leadership. Some of the variables in the content and context of the leader's role in foreign settings are shown in Exhibit
10-6. The multicultural leader's role thus blends leadership, communication, motivational, and other managerial skills within unique and ever-changing environments. We will examine the contingent nature of such leadership throughout this section.