Business Across Cultures Culture for Business Series_13 pot

Fiedler, for example, hypothesizes that leadership behavior interactswith the “favorableness of a situation” to determine effectiveness.. A new theory of leadership is thus needed to mod

factors such as the type of industry or culture Also it seems unlikelythat one can develop physical characteristics such as height, gender,and skin color… All this has been very helpful for those who saythat leaders are born and not made Furthermore, the effectiveness

of many of the properties appears to be culturally dependent Forexample, it is improbable that the traits of a good American leadercould have the same impact in Japan or France

A second stream of traditional thought is known as behavioral theory.

This approach does not rely so much on the personal properties ofthe leader, but focuses rather on the leader’s behavior, particularlythat behavior which influences the performances and motivation ofemployees Obviously here leadership style comes to the center ofattention It focuses on the behavior of leaders towards subordinatesand the manner in which the tasks and functions of leadership areconducted The classic study from Ohio State University, conducted

in the 40s and 50s, concluded that an initiating style exists – forwhich performance-targeted behavior is initiated with clear super-vision, results orientation, and role clarification – as does a more

“participative” consideration style, where leaders aim their ior at cooperation and satisfaction at work

behav-This model is very much centered on the work of researchers such asTannenbaum and Schmidt (1973) and Blake and Mouton (1964) whorespectively distinguished autocratic versus democratic orparticipative styles, and task-specific versus person-oriented styles

of leadership The weakness of this approach is that it ignores thecomplexity of the world of the relationship between both styles.Moreover, the context (culture, for example) is not taken into consid-eration in behavior theory and evidence from our research showsthis to be important

It is not surprising therefore that the third stream of thought

repre-sents situational theory If certain aspects of behavior – and trait

approaches – are related to a certain context or situation, a new andpromising explanation of the effectiveness of leadership evolvesfrom this The so called contingency theories of Fiedler (1967),House (1971), and Vroom & Yeton (1973) show that environmentalvariables are significant for the effectiveness of leadership The “onebest way” is buried forever It all depends

Fiedler, for example, hypothesizes that leadership behavior interactswith the “favorableness of a situation” to determine effectiveness

He draws the conclusion that a focused, task-oriented leadership isbetter in both extremely predictable and in very unforeseeable situa-tions, whereas people-oriented leadership is better in a situation ofaverage complexity Vroom and others distinguish an autocratic,consultative, and group style of leadership, for which the choicewould have to depend on the structure of the problem, the availableinformation, and the required quality of the decision

Although these three leadership frameworks describe many tions, strikingly little attention is given to the cultural context withinwhich leadership is practiced In fact the dilemmas that leaders arefacing in the current world are hardly considered or mentioned Ourresearch has revealed that the most important quality of a leader is

situa-to reconcile the distant ends of a dilemma situa-to a higher level Both traitand behavior theory continue to stall at the dilemma when facedwith culturally-bound characteristics and how they can be over-come, particularly in a globalizing world Situational leadershipwould stipulate different behavior in different cultural surround-ings But how would leaders then deal effectively within multi-cultural surroundings?

A new theory of leadership is thus needed to model the manner inwhich leaders will deal with value dilemmas We can infer from our

research findings that successful leaders in the current epoch of idly changing situations and multicultural surroundings need tooperate with a people-oriented style in order to accomplish theirtasks Leaders will have to be participative in order to be able to takeautocratic decisions at a higher level They will have to think logi-cally, a logic fed by an illogical intuition Finally a leader must bevery sensitive to the situation in order to take consistent decisionsregardless of that situation Only then can one observe whetherleaders are born or made As we will see, this requires a newmindset.

rap-A NEW THEORY FOR INTERNrap-ATIONrap-AL LErap-ADERSHIP

Why do leaders face dilemmas?

All organizations need stability and growth, long-term and term decisions, tradition and innovation, planning and laissez-faire,order and freedom The challenge for leaders is to fuse these oppo-sites, not to select one extreme at the expense of the other As aleader you have to inspire as well as listen You have to make deci-sions yourself but also delegate, and you need to centralize yourorganization around local responsibilities You have to be hands-onand yet hands-off As a professional, you need to master your mate-rials and at the same time you need to be passionately at one withthe mission of the whole organization You need to apply your bril-liant analytic skills in order to place these contributions in a largercontext You are supposed to have priorities and put them in a metic-ulous sequence, while parallel processing is in vogue You have todevelop a brilliant strategy and at the same time have all theanswers to questions in case your strategy misses its goals No won-der there are so many definitions of effective leadership

short-Our framework is intended as a meta-theory of leadership that scends culture and is based on the logic running through the whole

tran-of this book We have found that competence in reconciling mas is the most discriminating feature that differentiates successfulfrom less successful leaders – and that this correlates with bottom

“manage culture” by continually addressing dilemmas This alsomeans, increasingly, that the culture leads the organization Theleader defines what an organization views as excellent and develops

an appropriate environment in which the culture of the workforceculture is reconciled with the needs of the organization As a result,the organization and its workforce cannot do anything other thanexcel

THE INTEGRATION THEORY

The significance of the integrated approach is that it enables us todetermine the propensity for the individual to reconcile dilemmas.This is a direct measure of leadership We name this propensity toreconcile dilemmas “trans-cultural competence” and it transcendsany single culture in which it may be measured and thus provides arobust generalizable model for all organizational or national cultures.Our claim is that reconciliation is the real essence of leadership.Our approach based on a framework such as the Integrated TypeIndicator (as discussed in Chapter Seven) is different because it has

an underlying fundamental conceptual framework that while agers work to accomplish this or that separate objective, effectiveleaders deal with the dilemmas of seemingly “opposed” objectiveswhich they continually seek to reconcile Given the importance ofreconciling opposites, we are surprised that no instrument that mea-sures this has been previously devised (published)

man-Published models of leadership tend to lack any coherent ing rationale or base pre-proposition that predicts effectiveleadership behaviors These models tend to seek the same end, butdiffer in approach as they try to encapsulate the existing body ofknowledge about what makes an effective leader Because of themethodology adopted, these are only prescriptive lists, like a series

underly-of ingredients to a recipe (you can only guess at how the dish willturn out) and there is no underlying rationale or unifying theme thatdefines the holistic experience of the resulting meal

This creates considerable confusion for today’s trans-cultural ers Which paradigm should they fit into? Which meanings shouldthey espouse, their own or those of the foreign culture? Since most ofour management theory comes from the US and other Eng-lish-speaking countries, there is a real danger of ethnocentrism We

lead-do not know, for example, how the lists cited fare outside the US, orhow diverse conceptions of leadership may be Do different culturesnecessitate different styles? Can we reasonably expect other cultures

to follow a lead from outside?

Part of the difficulty in researching leadership has been that without

an agreed model of what effective leaders do, it is difficult to assessthe value of this participant observation To the interpretingobserver, many of the best leadership behaviors are often inexplica-ble and are not the stuff of science The observations are difficult tocode, classify, and regurgitate Can we know with certainty that itwould work for others?

DILEMMAS FACED BY LEADERS IN GLOBALIZING

ORGANIZATIONS

University education and too much training are still failing the newgeneration of potential leaders and managers This is still based on

the old Cartesian logic and scientific method where problems aredefined as closed systems and where the only variables that areselected are those that can be measured and controlled Apparently,all we then have to do is to evaluate alternate courses of action andselect the course that offers the lowest cost or the highest margin.However, at Trompenaars Hampden-Turner we have derived fourmain propositions from our research evidence relevant to the future

4 Management of change is based on adding value rather than

on throwing away the values of an old situation

All cultures and corporations have developed habitual ways ofresolving dilemmas, of being, for example, both well-centralizedand highly decentralized at the same time The job of the leader istherefore to integrate these apparent opposites The success of acompany will then depend (among other things) on both the auton-omy of its parts and how well the information arising from thisautonomy has been centralized and coordinated

If the leader does not usefully centralize information, scattered ations might as well be totally independent If the various business

oper-units are not free to act on local information, then HQ is subtracting,not adding, value Any network only justifies itself by fine-tuningthe values of decentralized action and centralized intelligence,which is then fed back to the various units.

In the last few years THT has not simply been trying to help our ents to become aware of cultural differences by mapping thosedifferences on bar charts We have extended our data capture, analy-sis, and profiling methods to chart the dilemmas that arise when yourespect the differences between cultures and their value orienta-tions

cli-Business leaders received these online simulated “interviews” withenormous enthusiasm They follow a semi-structured and openquestion format, rather than being multiple-choice questions Here

at last business leaders can (often anonymously) formulate the realissues and concerns they have in trying to grapple with real-worldproblems, tensions between competing priorities, demands andvalues THT’s new database of these responses offers significantinsights but is now so large that a more rigorous means of analysishas been required to trawl the richness of these free-text qualitative,value-laden responses

The aim was to elicit the commonly recurring dilemmas and isolatewhich issues are really important and of real concern to the modernbusiness leader The full spectrum of software analytical tools wascast at this data Initially we applied the more traditional KWICanalysis (Keywords in Context), followed by comprehensive Lin-guistic Analysis methods leading to the construction of a multi-layered unsupervised Kohonen Neural Network model

The results of this analysis are consistent with experiences and back from conferences, workshops, and consulting assignments,

feed-and are that the wide spectrum of issues can be clustered into a ber of categories Of particular interest is the consistency with whichleaders posed their problems as a series of extreme choices – “should

num-we do A or B?” where A and B are either equally attractive or equallyunattractive, and moreover are mutually exclusive These are typi-cally issues like “Should we send our young technical expert toimpress the client or our most senior member of staff, even thoughthey know little of the technology being offered?” When evaluatingthese extreme choices or courses of action, we find they are eitherequally attractive or equally unattractive but always apparentlymutually exclusive

One of our researchers found that the quality of the dilemmas lated with seniority/leadership level (Smeaton-Webb, 2003) Thuslower-level managers were less able to elicit dilemmas For example,they tended to give positives and negatives (“should we do or not

corre-do this,” which is not a dilemma) This is further support for the struct that leaders deal with dilemmas and managers with moreoperational decisions Another of our researchers (Broom, 2003)found a correlation between the capacity to elicit dilemmas and thescore on the Integrated Type Indicator (see Chapter Seven)

con-An example of the type of response we obtain from a WebCue™interview with a senior leader is this:

On the one hand … On the other hand …

The company is aiming for global

knowledge sharing in order to get

consistent forecasts, plans, and

expectations on likely outcomes of

comparable performance

The company has decentralized salesorganizations with the autonomy tofine-tune knowledge to localconditions

This WebCue™ technology is not time-consuming or

over-demand-ing for participants; it can be anonymous, and in a very short time avery detailed view is created of the client’s problems Using list andstring object software techniques, it is relatively easy to automatepre-processing, to the point where clusters of dilemmas can bereviewed by a facilitator/consultant.

This input generates so-called “raw dilemmas.” These are rized using the seven dimensions of culture model as a frame ofreference, enabling us to produce a series (typically 4–8) of what wecan call “principal dilemmas.” We usually equate or translate eachprincipal dilemma to a business function, like Human Resources,Strategy, Organization Structure, etc We can thus structure our feed-back to the client in terms of functional area dilemmas and valuesystems as appropriate Since the beginning of 2001, TrompenaarsHampden-Turner has made extensive use of this technology result-ing in the capturing of over 5000 dilemmas from a diverse clientbase And this is still growing very rapidly

catego-A typical example for a recent client project is shown below

%

Global organization interest versus Local subsidiary interest 25

Individual department/person versus Total organization/unit 10

Internal organization versus External focus on environment 7Focus on specific issues versus Breadth of options 3

Lack of leadership/management (complaints about the management) 10Lack of integrity/respect (complaints about stakeholders) 8

The dilemmas organized per business function are shown here:

Global organization interest versus

Local subsidiary interest

36% 20% 16% 8% 4% 24%Cost versus Investment 63% 18% 9% 9% – –Individual department/person versus

Total organization/unit

10% – 10% 30% 30% 20%Short-term versus Long-term focus 75% 25% – – – –Internal organization versus External

TYPICAL LEADERSHIP “GOLDEN” DILEMMAS

By clustering the frequently recurring dilemmas in our database, weobserve the following generic – which might be called “golden” –dilemmas, as they were found to apply to many organizations andwere admitted to by many leaders

1 Global organization interest versus Local subsidiary interest

2 Cost versus Investment

3 Individual department/person versus Total organization/unit

4 Short-term versus Long-term focus

5 Internal organization versus External focus on environment

6 Focus on specific issues versus Breadth of options

7 Leadership versus Management

Let us take one example – the second dilemma above, cost versusinvestment, and how we can help leaders or senior managers fromthis organization to reconcile that particular dilemma We follow aseries of methodological steps in achieving this that make use ofworksheet tools and grids Here’s an example of how we might fol-low these steps

In discussion, we expand the dilemma to the extreme ends and askthe client to consider the following:

On the one hand… On the other hand…

We best serve our organization by

achieving a lean and mean organization

and by cutting cost wherever we can

We best serve our organization byinvesting in the right area for achievinglong-term success

1 Which of these priorities is more fulfilling to you personally?

2 Judged by how it is measured and whom it promotes, which is more important to your organization?

Refer to Figure 9.1 Suppose you could allocate 0–10 points to Priority A,

“importance of cost cutting” and 0–10 points to Priority Z, “importance of investing.” Where would you locate your organization currently? (Place

an X in that square.) To where would you like to see it move? (Place an O there.)

3 What organizational measures can the firm implement to move closer

to the 10/10 position?

4 What individual steps can you as a professional take to move closer to the 10/10 position?

5 Compare the answers that individual (syndicate) group members have given to the questions above.

LEADERSHIP DILEMMAS CONCERNED WITH VALUES

This area deals with those values that need to be integrated duringorganizational alliances, mergers and acquisitions, and strategic alli-ances So what are these dilemmas that are created in a cross-borderalliance? The main dilemmas we have found within mergers andacquisitions (and strategic alliances) are the following:

1 Core values versus Local values

2 Centralization of systems versus Decentralization of processes

3 Integration of businesses versus Differentiation of businesses

10

0 Importance of investing 10

Figure 9.1 The dilemma grid of priorities