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The Role of National Culture on Leadership

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Submitted By lodder66
Words 8555
Pages 35
Executive Summary
The aim for this thesis is to answer the problem statement: How do national cultures influence leadership styles? To give an answer to this question, this thesis is divided into three parts: leadership, national culture and the connection between them. The conclusion of this thesis is based on analytical and exploratory research. The first part, on leadership, focuses on mainly two types of leadership: transactional and transformational leadership. Transactional leadership is mainly based on the transaction between leaders and their followers. Bass described four components of transactional leadership: Contingent reward, Active management by exception, Passive management by exception and Laissez-Faire leadership (1997). Transformational leadership focuses mainly on inspiring and stimulating the followers. Transformational leadership contains also four components: Idealized influence (Charisma), Inspirational motivation, Intellectual stimulation and Individualized consideration. The second part focuses on different studies on national culture: Hofstede (1983), Schwartz (1990) and Inglehart (1997). Each study has different values and dimensions, both all three studies show some similarities. The first similar dimension contains: Hofstede’s Power distance, Schwartz’ Hierarchy versus Egalitarianism and Inglehart’s Survival and measures the degree to which the people in a national culture accept and expect the unequal distribution of power. The second similar dimension contains: Hofstede’s Individualism, Schwartz’ Autonomy versus Embeddedness and Inglehart’s Self-Expression and measures the degree to which an individual is integrated into groups. The third part of this thesis focuses on the connection between leadership and national culture. The GLOBE project stated that cultural values affect leaders and their behavior and leaders are most likely to

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