Cultural Differences And Their Effects On Leadership

Every organization has values and beliefs that define what they do and how they do things in the organization. These values have significant influence on how the employees behaves and the general performance of the organization – it is these set of values and beliefs, rooted deep in the company’s organizational structure that depict the “dos”, “don’t” and the “hows”, of the organization and these unequivocally represents the culture of the organization. This concept became popular in the 1980s when Peters and Waterman in their book: “In search of Excellence” presented the profound argument that, the success of any organization is inextricable linked to the quality of its culture. (Carpenter, M., Taylor, B., Erdogan, B. 2009 p183). The purpose of this paper is an attempt to analyse the impact diverse cultures played in the success of the Lincoln Electric Company.

If I were the CEO of a multinational corporation in the 21st century, it would be critical for me to develop and employ a cross cultural approach to the leadership in consultation with Hofstede's Five Cultural Dimensions. Though I have prior knowledge of management theories and other examples of Hofstede's work, "Cultural Constraints in Management Theories" (1993) was a welcomed shock and surprise. One of the aspects of the article that struck me the most was the clear demonstration of the singularity of the American style, perspective, and application of management in the workplace. This fact made it abundantly clear to me, that as the CEO of a hypothetical multinational corporation, that it is imperative for the sake of my financial success, professional reputation, and for the sake of all my employees, I must not implement the American style of management as part of the leadership practice.

Dr. Hofstede performed a comprehensive study of how values in the workplace are influenced by culture. In the 1970’s, as a Dutch researcher Dr. Geert Hofstede, collected and analyzed data from 116,000 surveys taken from IBM employees in forty different countries around the world. From those results, Hofstede developed a model that identifies four primary dimensions of differentiate cultures. These include: Uncertainty Avoidance (UA), Masculinity-Femininity (MAS), Individualism-Collectivism (IND), Power and Distance (PD). After a further study of the Asian culture by researcher Michael Bond in 1991, Hofstede added a fifth dimension in his theory, Long- and Short-term time orientation (LTO), also referred to as the Confucian Dynamism. His research has framed how cultural differences can be used in professional business transactions. Geert Hofstede 's dimensions analysis can assist the business person in better understanding the intercultural differences within regions and between countries.

To show how culture influences the values that exist in the workplace, Geert Hofstede, a Dutch social psychologist and international management professor at

“Your employees come first and if you treat your employee’s right, guess what? Your customers come back, and that makes your shareholders happy. Start with employees and the rest follow from that.” This quote from Herb Kelleher, co-founder of Southwest Airlines, embodies the leadership at the airline. Southwest is the leading low-cost airline based in Dallas, Texas and founded in 1967 by Herb Kelleher and Rollin King. They dare to differ from other carriers because their philosophy revolves around people both internal and external. Communication, culture, and leadership are the cornerstone of their success. This paper explores key leader’s communique tactics, the role communication plays in daily operations, how the

This essay is in the area of workforce diversity, specifically cultural diversity. The purpose of this essay is to critically examine cultural diversity with the perspectives from manager’s competences and leadership style. Therefore, this essay will critically examine the workforce diversity concept and the implications of leadership, competencies and management. Several of strategies available for managers to deal with diversity in the workplace will be discussed. There are many types of leadership theories and styles, where each of them address cultural diversity in different ways. For this essay, two theories of leadership will be focused on, namely charismatic and transformational leadership. This essay will explore which type of leadership is more appropriate in terms of dealing with cultural diversity. The discussion will also draw upon examples from ANZ to provide supporting evidence. It will be shown from the analysis that ANZ more likely achieves it success by following transformational leadership style. The lessons are that managers of the future will have to be aware of the benefits and costs of transformational leadership style to develop more diverse organization.

An organization’s culture governs day to day behavior. This type of power may be seen as a control mechanism, which businesses use to manipulate internal and external perception. Every organization has a set of assumed understandings that must be adopted and implemented by new employees in order for them to be accepted. Conformity to the culture becomes the primary basis for reward by the organization. “The role of culture in influencing employee behavior appears to be increasingly important in today’s workplace, as organizations have widened spans of control, flattened structures, introduced teams, reduced

To begin with the cultural context, it states the concepts of culture and how its collective frameworks influence a specific individual member of a group or society and how that member illustrates and understood communal affairs and behaviors. Such collective framework tends to rise up with diverse traditions, heritages, religions and rituals.

In this essay, we are going to explore my experience as a leader as well as team member in a multi cultured group. What make you a leader? and what are the qualities and requirement to be a leader? The study of leadership has always been a core concern for the social and behavioral science. Leadership is indissolubly knotted to team membership. Studying leadership leads to several questions concerning the social psychology of leadership. Leadership is pre-eminently a group process(Chemers,2001). Since leadership involves people, there must be a group of people following the leader and working towards a common goal. According to Kakabadse, Bank and Vinnicombe (2004) “Synergy is the aim of all team working-to produce an output where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”, output of a team work is much greater than the combination of works made by individual separately. Every team member has their own role in group work. Every member of team has individual roles in their team and are led by one of them who has leadership quality’s towards their goals (Belbin,1981). All members in a group or organization should have a sense of individual responsibility for the task, team and individual circles. But not all are accountable. That is the leaders burden and that is why they have high authority. Even the management have similar qualities but the truth is that leadership and management are different concepts but they overlap.

The business model, into this age of information, has integrated itself with many cultures. One of the results of this globalization is development and research into international business and work related culture. In a recent paper by Mooij & Hofstede (2010), it found focus on researching and investigating culture is becoming more popular. Looking at the exponential growth and influence of international, more International Managers are becoming aware of the impact and importance of national culture on organizational culture.

The most famous study about how culture relates to values in the workplace was conducted by Geert Hofstede. From 1967 to 1973 he did a long research among more than 1 million employees in IBM company. He identified 5

Leadership is no longer a simple phenomenon related to the management of human resources. With increasing diversity and intercultural settings at the workplace, many leaders have to juggle between their standard organizational roles and cultural adaptations that need to be done considering the level of employees ' variety.

A Dutch Social psychologist, Geert Hofstede carried out research studies on cross-cultural groups and organizations. He defined culture as a collective programing of the mind that makes the members of one group different from those of another group. His studies were instrumental in the developing of a systematic framework that is used in the assessment and the differentiation of organizational and national cultures. The framework was designed to show how a society’s culture affects the values of the members, and also, how the values relate to their behaviors. Hofstede was born on October 2nd 1982 and was an employee of IBM. At IBM International, Hofstede worked as a trainer in management and also as a manager of research on personnel. It is at this point, when he made a transition into psychology from engineering. He was highly recognized through his work on developing the cultural dimensions theory. His work was found useful by scholars and practitioners who took interest in the relationships between different cultures. His position in IBM International gave him opportunities to interact with and study different cultures around the world. This is because IBM had over 70 subsidiaries in different countries around the world. Hofstede travelled and conducted surveys and interviews in different parts of the world regarding people’s behaviors in their workplaces and how they interacted.

Hofstede (1980) found five dimensions of culture in his study of national work related values. The dimensions are:

The world is an ever-changing place. Advances in technology are being made everyday. How people are communicating is evolving everyday. More companies and organizations develop globally everyday. Now that so much of the work force is global how are people suppose to deal with different cultures? By studying actions of different countries Geert Hofstede has developed five dimensions of culture. The five dimensions are; power distance, individualism, masculinity, uncertainty avoidance, and pragmatism (MindTools, n.d). By utilizing the five dimensions people can have a better understanding of why cultures do things one way. Also, people can figure out the best way to interact with other cultures. Australia and Spain are opposite but, also similar in the five dimensions.