Session 7 - Culture and Leadership

Question 1

What is culture?

Answer 1

• learned beliefs, values, rules, norms, symbols, & traditions that are common to a group of people
• shared qualities of a group that make them unique
• is the way of life, customs, & scripts of a group of people

Question 2

What is the difference between multicultural and diversity?

Answer 2

Multicultural: approach or system that takes more than one culture into account
Diversity: existence of more than one culture within one group or organisation

Question 3

What are the challenges of globalisation?

Answer 3

Increased interdependence between nations: Economic, social, technical, political
- Has created many challenges
- Need to design multinational organizations
- Identify and select leaders for these organizations
- Manage organizations with culturally diverse employees

Question 4

What are the five cross-culture competencies for leaders?

Answer 4

1. understand business, political & cultural environments
2. Learn the perspective, tastes, trends of cultures
3. beable to work silmutanesouly with people from many cultures
4. be able to adapt to living and communicating in other cultures
5. need to learn to relate from people from other cultures

Question 5

What is ethnocentrism?

Answer 5

• tendency for individuals to place their own group at the center (e.g., USA)
• perception that one’s own culture is better
• there is a tendency that everyone is ethnocentric to some degree

Question 6

Why can ethnocentrism prevent effective leadership?

Answer 6

prevents people from understanding/ respecting other cultures

Question 7

What are prejudices?

Answer 7

• a largely fixed attitude, belief, or emotion held by an individual about another individual or group
  based on faulty or unsubstantiated data
• Involves inflexible generalizations that are resistant to change or evidence
• A skilled leader needs to find ways to negotiate with followers from various cultural backgrounds

Question 8

What are the two cultural dimensions of organizations according to Trompenaars?

Answer 8

1. egalitarian-hierarchical: degree to which cultures exhibit shared power vs. hierarchical power
2. person task orientation: degree to which cultures emphasise human interaction vs. focusing on tasks

Question 9

What are Hofstede’s 5 major dimensions on which cultures differ?

Answer 9

1. power distance
2. masculinity/ feminity (now motivation towards achievement and success)
3. short/ long orientation
4. individualism
5. uncertainty avoidance

Question 10

How did culture play a role in plane crashes?

Answer 10

South Korea has a big power distance, so when the captain made a mistake, the second officers where too afraid to tell him directly and the plane crashed
Solution: switch to englisch to avoid hierarchical language and only use first names