MANAGeMeNT ACROSS CULTUReS

Management across cultures



Management across cultures

Since there is no consensual agreement on the terms leadership or culture, it would seem impossible to define the term cross-cultural leadership. Yet, as discussed earlier, definitions of culture and leadership each share common themes. To the terms leadership and culture , we now add cross. The “cross” in “crosscultural leadership” refers to the leader's (the influencer) culture being different from the follower's (influence target) culture (Barrett, 2006).

By combining the thematic definitions of “leadership” and “culture” with the qualifier “cross,” we define cross-cultural leadership as “the ability of an individual (the leader) to intentionally and unequally influence and motivate members of a culturally different group toward the achievement of a valued outcome by appealing to the shared knowledge and meaning systems of that culturally different group.” In reviewing this definition, it becomes clear that what separates cross-cultural leadership from simple leadership are the words “culturally different.” What separates simple leadership from crosscultural leadership is the need for leaders to consider the implications of the differences in the knowledge and meaning systems of their followers and to incorporate these differences into the influence process (Dickson, 2007).

These differences in terminology (cosmopolitan, global leader, international leader, and transnational leader) are characteristic of a relatively new academic area of study such as cross-cultural leadership (House, 2007).

These differences in organizational culture may also be traced to differences in the interests of researchers and commentators. Strategists tend to be interested in the tasks to be done, the accountabilities accepted, and the results anticipated. For example, a Korean leader based in New York managing a group of Korean employees in Seoul and a group of Korean employees in Bangkok may not be engaging in cross-cultural leadership because the leader and the led are separated by physical space and not by cognitive space (Dickson, 2007).

Cross-cultural leadership offers an approach to, rather than a definitive rule for, identifying cross-cultural leadership. For example, someone might argue that a United States Southerner leading a group of from the northern United States would be exercising cross-cultural leadership because of regional differences in attitudes, values, or intra-state regulatory systems. What is missing from such an argument is that the shared meanings and knowledge systems are more common across U.S. regions than different (Barrett, 2006). The situation where meaningful differences exist but are smaller than the shared meaning and knowledge systems is more appropriately referred to as leadership of cultural diversity.

The inability to develop an easily applied and inviolate rule to identify cross-cultural differences may be why so many scholars, especially organizational scholars, have relied on national boundaries as proxies for cultural differences. National boundaries are easily identifiable, have identifiable differences in legislative laws and processes, and are often formed along cultural differences in the citizenry. But as the Soviet example introduced earlier illustrates, these boundaries are often inexact (Dickson, 2007). Imagine someone who was “just a leader” in the former Soviet states awakening to find that he or she is now regarded as a cross-cultural leader ...