Influence of National Culture and Gender in Leadership Style

¶ … globalization that diversified cultures and backgrounds have converged and are working together in collaboration. Considering the scenario of today's world, the rapidly changing demographics have played a critical role in the emergence of new styles of leadership. The definition of competitiveness and the qualities associated with a leader have also changed in the current times. And among all the qualities the two most prominent qualities that every leader must possess is related to the consideration of equity of gender, and equity of diversified cultures.

Different cultures suggest different roles for males and females based on their unique value system. The mindsets, couture, and eating habits of almost all the cultures are traditionally unique. Countries belonging to a particular geographical area behave in a certain way, so do the organizations and leaders belonging to those areas. Their attitude and approach is derived from their cultural values. Some countries have common cultures whereas on the other hand multiple cultures also exist within culture itself or within a country or within an organization. Similarly an individual can also have a multicultural orientation. Human beings are divided into two major classes or categories; masculine and feminine which differ physically, biologically, and psychologically. The roles are generally different based on the physical, social, and cultural needs. Yet there are some common roles that both males and females are performing (Hofstede, 1985).

Organizations tend to hire only the best people regardless of their background, gender or origin. This practice has resulted in changed demographics all over the world and all the leading organizations of the world like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and others have employees belonging from different cultural backgrounds and the ratio among male and female in these organizations are almost same as well.

General gender difference in communication

Gender differences in communication, identity development, sexuality and almost every other thing have remained a topic of interest among anthropologists, thinkers and psychologists alike. While apparently they seem to behave alike on many occasions- for example both men and women would show remorse for wrong actions, apologize for mistakes made, feel excited and happy after achieving something, want to love and be loved, but still on deeper level there are found many stark differences that tend to push men and women at extreme opposite ends of the behavior spectrum. Women are believed to have a nurturing nature while men are more macho in their approach. Similarly women are more sensitive while men usually shrug off emotions as if they would make them appear weak and vulnerable. These and such other issues have resulted in conflict of sorts that has resulted in men and women believing they just don't live on the same planet.

Women are supposedly more empathic in their approach to others while men seem to care less about other people's feelings. Numerous books and articles on gender differences have only served to exaggerate this gap. Women and men have silently suffered from lack of understanding since ages but it's only now that their pain has found voice and is being articulated by such prominent writers as Deborah Tannen and John Gray. Tannen's, You Just Don't Understand, and Gray's Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, have at least helped in giving voice to these issues that had hitherto remained hidden under the surface. Tannen based her book on the premise that "Boys and girls grow up in what are essentially different cultures, so talk between women and men is cross-cultural communication (Tannen, 1990, p.18). While John Gray wrote in USA Weekend (2003) that: "I've built a reputation on the premise that the sexes communicate with each other as if they came from different planets. I think we see proof that we don't become different over the years, but rather we start out that way (p.6)."

Larry Crab in his book, Men and Women, Enjoying the Difference, focuses on the gender differences debate and explains that men and men are given different roles to play and fulfillment of these roles is what forces them to adopt different strategies to similar problems. He explains:

Masculinity, I suggest, might therefore be thought of as the satisfying awareness of the substance God as placed within a man's being that can make an enduring contribution to God's purposes in his world, and will be deeply valued by others, especially his wife, as a reliable source of wise, sensitive, compassionate, and decisive involvement. (160)

Femininity, at its core, might therefore be thought of as the secure awareness of the substance God has placed within a woman's being that enables her to confidently and warmly invite others into relationship with God and with herself, knowing that there is something in each relationship to be wonderfully enjoyed. (163)

No matter how we encapsulate the entire debate, the one thing that is blatantly clear from each book on gender differences is that both men and women belong to different cultures and their development in widely dissimilar cultures conditions their minds to behave in a unique fashion. "Men's and women's communication styles are startlingly dissimilar...communication is the most glaring of the differences between the sexes." (De Vito, 2002, p. 84). Women are found to be better at trouble talks. This means when a tricky situation comes up, women are more likely to handle it better than men who are believed to be more aggressive and thus less qualified for resolving conflicts. Michaud and Warner based their study on Tannen's hypothesis and explained:

Summarizing Tannen's description of gender difference in the frequency of use of communication styles, it appears that men are more likely than women to respond to troubles talk by giving advice, joking, changing the subject, or giving no response. Women are more likely than men to respond to troubles talk by sharing a similar problem or expressing sympathy. Summarizing her description of the emotional or evaluative responses to communication styles: she suggested that when they receive sympathy, women feel more comforted and closer to their partners than men; men who receive sympathy tend to feel more angry or put down. According to Tannen, neither men nor women evaluate advice giving very positively, but her examples suggest that men are more likely to feel "put down" by receiving advice than women. (pp. 528-529)

Organization Culture And National Culture Impact In An Organization

Globalization has allowed organizations to have employees from different nationalities working together towards one organizational objective. Because people have different backgrounds, therefore their cultural norms, perception and way of working differs as well. It is possible that an act that is considered as a good gesture in one national norm might not be considered good in other culture. For instance, in an organization when an individual do not shake hands with someone, generally it is perceived that this is not a good habit, and the other person is disrespecting the handshake, however in Indian culture, when a person is not shaking hands it is considered absolutely normal and people tend to not to consider this as an act of disrespect.

Generally in an organization when people belong from different cultural backgrounds, it is hard for everyone to recognize and understand the differences in culture. To avoid such differences in culture, organizations have their own culture so that employees working in the organization are fully aware of what they are supposed to do in each circumstance. The role of the leader plays a very important role in developing the organization culture, because the leader is the representative of the house and he or she needs to be an inspirational figure that can direct the team in an effective manner towards the achievement of goal. When people from different cultural backgrounds are working together, the leader needs to identify the qualities and needs of each person working in the team and then lead and manage the team according to his needs, want and demands. This is a high contingent approach that a leader needs to act upon, and although people within the same cultures, national background or gender might have some common behavior and preferences but every individual in all aspects will be different from any other member within the team (Harris & Moran, 1996).

According to the expectancy theory every individual within a group has different preferences, opinions and expects different behavior from a leader on a similar situation (Schmidt, 1973). Hence, a leader needs to identify the expectation of the individual member of the team, and needs to deliver according to the expectation so that the person is motivated and work according to the standard that has been set (Fiedler, 2005). Although the recognition of expectations of an individual is difficult task but an important one, however if a leader applies Maslow's hierarchy of needs theory and ERG theory on an individual, this generalizes the concept of requirement and eventually results in providing good grounds to understand where a person stands in terms of needs. People who are striving for the physiological needs would need money, to cater their requirements, whereas people who are at self-esteem or self-actualization level would require fame to get satisfied, more importantly the behavior and reaction to every situation of these two different people will also be different. Therefore, it is the sole responsibility of the leader to observe and identify correctly where the individual stands and how this individual can be dealt in terms of persuasion or in order to make an inspirational impact (Wahba, 1976).

According to Greet Hofstede, the study of national differences is very important because universal management is nothing and there is no single success formula to deal with every people and lead every individual. The management theories, leadership styles and methods change across the globe. The management exists everywhere with different meaning and different styles, there are some people who are based on Theory X, and then there are people who are based on Theory Y People having the characteristics of theory X love to work and fulfill their needs through getting the payment of that work, whereas people having the characteristics of theory Y do not want to work yet they want to achieve highest level of success without any strive. Dealing with these two different kinds of people is difficult. And in order to masterly deal with the cultural dimensions within an organization, a leader can utilize the concept of cultural dimensional model that are also presented by Geert Hostedede, where he describes a framework that has different value perspectives among the national cultures.

Power Distance

Power Distance is the degree to which a country or a nation accepts the inequity and distribution of power. Some people treat people from different culture, race groups, and ethnic background equally. And they do not tolerant any kind of inequity if they observe then they even raise their voice and try every possibility to overcome the problem.

On the other hand, there are some people for which power distance is very low and they do not observe the inequality that is spread out in their surrounding, in fact at times these people perceive the inequality as their fate and perfectly accept the high power distance. Hence, it is important to identify the power distance for every group of people because this actually defines the direction of leadership if it is going to be autocratic or democratic leadership. And the leader that people will inspire will be transactional or transformational (Fiedler, 1972).

Individualism vs. Collectivism

This is another scale that defines if a person is happy living isolated or if he wants to be within a group where he feels secure. There are some people who are able to perform well when they are independent, then there are people who are not able to handle work on their own, and require expert opinions, guidelines from different people so that they can achieve their destination. There are only few people who can perform equal quality work in both the conditions that is individually and in group as well. The most important part in collectivism or group working is communication, a person needs to be equally aware of how he needs to communicate with his team members and how the pace of the task will go through when same directions are given to each member.

Masculinity vs. Femininity

Although the modern world is striving to eliminate gender discrimination and its differences from organizations, but still due to human psychological heritage the dominance of gender remains within the minds of many people in the world. In many cultures, even today male is considered to be dominant over female and the degree to which this dominance, assertiveness and acquisition is possessed defines the person's understanding and comfort to work in equal gender ratio. People who perceive inequality of gender as important are usually not able to work with opposite gender in the workplace easily. This is a natural phenomena and a leader is supposed to identify this difference correctly as well in order to deal with that gender neutrally.

Uncertainty Avoidance

People in different parts of the world are comfortable working in different styles; some people think that work should be done no matter how it is done. The logs creation is not important and only if the purpose of the work is fulfilled then there is nothing better than that. Secondly, there are contrasting perceptions as well, where people want to perform in a highly structured manner. Everything needs to be in a proper shape and every task should be perfectly defined in order. This degree to which people like to work on structured to non-structured task is known as uncertainty avoidance. There are a few important things that are dependent upon these preferences. For instance people who prefer structured tasks take more time to produce results, but their results are of higher quality, and if any problem exists within the process they re-engineer the process and identify the problem creation point from where they change it. On the other hand, the people who prefer unstructured tasks are more concerned about the quick results, regardless of the quality they produce and if they find any problem in the process they restart the process from scratch instead of finding out the problem (Hersey & Blanchard, 1988).

Long-term vs. Short-term orientation

The long-term values are defined in the manner how people perceive to see their future life. The values they prefer for their future, the savings they would like to make to secure their future. These kinds of people are mostly savers of economy, and tend to invest their money in risk free investments. The short-term orientation interprets the values for different tradition, social obligations and others who are working from different backgrounds (Hofstede, 1983).

These five dimensional framework covers almost all aspects that a diversified culture would have, however it is also the responsibility of the leader to quickly observe and identify among which category people can fit in better according to the category these people are served. In multinational organizations, cultural diversity comes into play with a bigger role, and the responsibility of a leader to unite all the diversified workforce increases significantly. Apart from these cultural differences the most important classification of human is gender classification which also has to be considered while identifying these aspects, not only in terms of followers, but in terms of managerial and leadership qualities as well.