Chapter 6 – Culture and Leadership

Culture

• 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

-> food, religion, geographic (italian cuisine in US)

 Why is cultue important? -> for understanding

Geographic: Same genetic background, but in different geographics has an influence (Darwin)

Terms related to culture

• Multicultural – approach or system that takes more than one culture into account

• Diversity – existence of different cultures or ethnicities within a group or organization

Globalization  

• 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

• 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

- Video Catherine Tate: Stereotype is neither good nor bad, our brain uses it to make sense of complex / new information

- Prejudice (the second part of stereotypes) is problematic

-> we need to be aware of stereotyping to prevent prejudice

• Hall (1976) reported that a primary characteristic of cultures is degree of focus – on the individual (individualistic) or on the group (collectivistic)

• Trompenaars (1994) classified an organization’s culture into 2 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

• Hofstede (1980, 2001) benchmark research identified 5 major dimensions on which cultures differ

  • used IBM, because all people have the same company culture, so he could connect his findings to origin (and not company culture)

  • showed that every nation has its own traits – he ruled out confounding’s, because all people had same company culture = traits could be traced back only to national culture

• Individualism

• Long-Term Orientation

• Uncertainty Avoidance

• Power-Distance

• Masculinity

(Indulgence)

Individualism vs. Collectivism:

• individualistic cultures focus on own well-being

• collectivistic cultures focus on well-being of society

• whether people's self-image is defined in terms of "I" or "We"

- to care about family/kins is caring about your own well-being

- culture biases our interpretation -> e.g. Italians are individualistic, therefore porfessor intepreted masks in Japan in a wrong way (thought they protect themselves from other people)

Long-Term vs. Short-Term Orientation:

High Long-Term orientation: societies take a more pragmatic approach: they encourage thrift and efforts in modern education as a way to prepare for the future

Low Long-Term Orientation: societies prefer to maintain time-honoured traditions and norms while viewing societal change with suspicion -> Normative societies

has to do with the way that a society deals with the fact that the future can never be known: should we try to control the future or just let it happen? (e.g. Portugal high)

High Uncertainty Avoidance: societies prefer security and structure = risk-averse

Low Uncertainty Avoidance: societies embrace challenges = risk-seeking

Describes the acceptance of authority In a social hirachy.

Power Distance is defined as the extent to which the less powerful members of institutions and organisations within a country expect and accept that power is distributed unequally

High Power-Distance: accept and respect authority

Low Power-Distance: question authority – see authority as a peer

The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes

Here: explanation of plane crashes based on ethnicity (theore = a explanation)

• Example Korean Airline

  • First officer and flight engineer don’t explain the problem -> high power-distance in Korea

  • Airlines Actions: have to speak English and adress everyone by their first name (strip off title in every converstaion)

  • Using first names makes it easier to challenge authority

  • Here it was an intracultural problem

• Example Columbian Airline

  • Intercultural problem

  • Columbian pilots did not use the word emergency when talking to the TO about not havin enough fuel

  • Answer to TA:  “I guess so”

  • Columbia = high power-distance

Masculinity vs. Femininity

It is about gender stereotypes. Some countries reward feminine some masculin behaviour of people (rewarded if act in accordance with prominent stereotype in society/culture)

High Masculinity: strong, aggressive, motivation towards achievements and success gets rewarded, society will be driven by competition, achievement and success

Low Masculinity: (feminin) acting in a caring way gets rewarded, dominant values in society are caring for others and quality of life, quality of life is the sign of success and standing out from the crowd is not admirable

-> Fundamental issue here is what motivates people, wanting to be the best (Decisive) or liking what you do (Consensus-oriented)

-> masculinity dimension correlates with individualistic dimension

Indulgence

Sixth dimension – was recently added, there is not enough data yet to support that it exists

-> we have to base our judgment of a country on data not on experience (is not reliable)

-> Problem Hofstede: effect of a dead star – it takes a long time to change the distribution at the moment you see results based on data from a few decades ago, avergaes are shown