Ethics And Culture

Question 1

Five cross-cultural competencies for leaders (Adler & Bartholomew, 1992)

Answer 1

1. Understand business, political, and cultural environments worldwide.
   Read ecnonomist
   2. Learn the perspectives, tastes, trends, and technologies of many cultures.
   3. Be able to work simultaneously with people from many cultures.
   4. Be able to adapt to living and communicating in other cultures.
2. Need to learn to relate to people from other cultures from a position of equality rather than superiority.

Question 2

Culture

Answer 2

• Learned beliefs, values, rules, norms, symbols and traditions that are common to a group of people.

 • Shared qualities of a group that make them unique. 

• Is the way of life, customs and scripts of a group of people.

Question 3

• Multicultural

Answer 3

approach or system that takes more than one culture into account.

Question 4

Diversity

Answer 4

existence of different cultures or ethnicities within a group or organisation.

Question 5

Ethnocentrism

Answer 5

See my culture superior to others
We all have mental models
Understand what they are

• The tendency for individuals to place their own group (ethnic, racial or cultural) at the centre of their observations of the world.

• Perception that one’s own culture is better or more natural than other cultures.

• Is a universal tendency and each of us is ethnocentric to some degree.

• Ethnocentrism can be a major obstacle to effective leadership.

• Prevents people from understanding or respecting other cultures.

Question 6

Prejudice

Answer 6

Amount of interaction between family and work is different
• A largely fixed attitude, belief or emotion held by an individual about another individual or group that is based on faulty or unsubstantiated data.

• Involves inflexible generalisations that are resistant to change or evidence.

• Is self-oriented rather than other-oriented.

• Leaders face the challenge of dealing with their own prejudices and those of followers.

• A skilled leader needs to find ways to negotiate with followers from various cultural backgrounds.

Question 7

Dimensions of Culture

Answer 7

Trompenaars (1994) classified an organisation’s culture into two dimensions:
• Egalitarian-hierarchical – degree to which cultures exhibit shared power vs. hierarchical power.

 • Person-task orientation – extent to which cultures emphasize human interaction vs. focusing on tasks.

Question 8

Five major dimensions on which cultures differ:

Answer 8

Power distance : individuals and leaders
Uncertainty avoidance: how important to avoid uncertainty
Individualism-collectivism
Masculinity-femininity: what is the tradition on how female and male wor
Long-term/short-term orientation

Question 9

Nine Cultural Dimensions (House et. al., 2004)

Answer 9

1. Uncertainty avoidance
   • Extent to which a society, organisation, or group relies on established social norms, rituals, and procedures to avoid uncertainty.A structured workplace won’t be use to chaos
2. Power Distance
   • Degree to which members of a group expect and agree that power should be shared unequally.Low power distance
3. Institutional Collectivism
   • Degree to which an organization or society encourages institutional or societal collective action.Korean companies
   4. In-Group Collectivism
      • Degree to which people express pride, loyalty, and cohesiveness in their organizations or families.
4. Gender Egalitarianism
   • Degree to which an organization or society minimizes gender role differences and promotes gender equality.
5. Assertiveness
   • Degree to which people in a culture are determined, assertive, confrontational, and aggressive in their social relationships.
   Germans, Dutch, South Africans
   7. Future Orientation
      • Extent to which people engage in future-oriented behaviours such as planning, investing in the future, and delaying gratification.
6. Performance Orientation
   • Extent to which an organization or society encourages and rewards group members for improved performance and excellence.Singapore is driven on this
7. Humane Orientation
   • Degree to which a culture encourages and rewards people for being fair, altruistic, generous, caring, and kind to others.

Question 10

Characteristics of Clusters

Answer 10

• Anglo– competitive and result-oriented

• Confucian Asia – result-driven, encourage group working together over individual goals

• Eastern Europe – forceful, supportive of co-workers, treat women with equality

• Germanic Europe – value competition & aggressiveness and are more result-oriented

• Latin America – loyal & devoted to their families and similar groups

• Latin Europe – value individual autonomy

• Middle East – devoted & loyal to their own people, women afforded less status

• Nordic Europe – high priority on long-term success, women treated with greater equality

• Southern Asia – strong family & deep concern for their communities

• Sub-Sahara Africa – concerned & sensitive to others, demonstrate strong family loyalty

Question 11

• GLOBE research identified six global leadership behaviours

Answer 11

1. Charismatic/value-based leadership reflects the ability to inspire, to motivate, and to expect high performance from others based on strongly held core valuesPoppy syndrome
   2. Team-oriented leadership emphasizes team building and a common purpose among team members.
   3. Participative leadership reflects the degree to which leaders involve others in making and implementing decisions.
      How much is appropriate?
   4. Humane-oriented leadership emphasizes being supportive, considerate, compassionate, and generous.
   5. Autonomous leadership refers to independent and individualistic leadership, which includes being autonomous and unique.
   6. Self-protective leadership reflects behaviours that ensure the safety and security of the leader and the group.

Question 12

Culture Clusters and Desired Leadership Behaviours (Some examples)

Answer 12

Confucian Asia leadership profile

• A leader who works and cares about others but uses status and position to make independent decisions without input of others.
Minimize chaos...dont take in everyones opinion

Southern Asia leadership profile
• Effective leadership as especially collaborative, inspirational, sensitive to people’s needs and concerned with status and face saving.

Anglo leadership profile
• Want leaders to be exceedingly motivating and visionary, considerate of others, team-oriented and autonomous and not autocratic.

Middle East leadership profile
• Leadership emphasizes status and face saving and deemphasizes charismatic, value-based and group oriented leadership.

There are people who just want to follow

Question 13

GLOBE CEO Study (2014)

Answer 13

• Large-scale study of strategic leadership and leadership behaviours among CEOs and Top Management Team (TMT) members across cultures and countries

• Designed to focus on four key questions:
1. How does national culture influence the kinds of leadership behaviours expected in a society?

2. What CEO behaviours generally lead to success?

3. What are some distinctions between high-performing and underperforming CEOs? 

4. Does leadership success depend on a CEO matching his/her leadership style to the leadership expectations within the society?

Leadership focus

Question 14

CEO Behaviours and Success

Answer 14

• Success defined as TMT dedication and firm competitive performance

• Charismatic leadership behaviours were consistently the most impactful leadership behaviour for achieving success

• Team-oriented behaviour is the next most important leadership behaviour, followed by humane-oriented leadership

• Participative leadership moderately related to TMT dedication but not firm performance

• Autonomous and self-protective leadership are generally ineffective

Question 15

Importance of Behaviour-Expectation Match

Answer 15

• The “fit” between CEO’s behaviour and the leadership expectations within a society predicts success

• Better fit with expectations gives the CEO better results in terms of the TMT dedication and firm performance

• Superior CEOs exceed their societies’ expectations on most global leadership dimensions, and especially in terms of charismatic and team-oriented leadership (being visionary, performance-oriented, and administratively competent)

Culture and CEO is important to understand the style of leadership

Question 16

Strengths

Answer 16

How to play the Politics in that particular culture?
• GLOBE study is a major study and, to date, the only study to analyse how leadership is viewed by cultures in all parts of the world.

• Findings from GLOBE are valuable because they emerge from a well-developed quantitative research design, and studies are updated regularly.

• GLOBE studies provide a classification of cultural dimensions that is more expansive than the commonly used Hofstede classification system.

• GLOBE studies provide useful information about what is universally accepted as good and bad leadership.

• The study of culture and leadership underscored the complexity of the leadership process and how it is influenced by culture.

Question 17

Criticism

Answer 17

• Research does not provide a clear set of assumptions and propositions that can form a single theory about the way culture relates to leadership or influences the leadership process.

• Labels and definitions of cultural dimensions and leadership behaviours are somewhat vague, difficult at times to interpret or fully comprehend the findings about culture and leadership.

• This study focuses on what people perceive to be leadership and ignores a large body of research that frames leadership in terms of what leaders do (e.g. transformational leadership, path-goal theory)

• Researchers in the GLOBE study measured leadership with subscales that represented a very broad range of behaviours and as a result compromised the precision and validity of the leadership measures.

• The GLOBE studies tend to isolate a set of attributes that are characteristic of effective leaders without considering the influence of situational effects.

Question 18

Application

Answer 18

• The findings about culture can help leaders understand their own cultural biases and preferences.

• Different cultures have different ideas about what they expect from their leaders, and these findings help our leaders adapt their style to be more effective in different cultural settings.

• The findings can help global leaders communicate more effectively across cultural and geographic boundaries.

• Information on culture and leadership can be used to build culturally sensitive websites, design new employee orientation programmes, conduct programmes in relocation training, and improve global team effectiveness.