Cross-cultural Leadership Behavior Adjustment: Expatriate Senior Managers in China

Abstract

It has been argued that the adjustment of leadership behavior is essential to leader effectiveness in a cross-cultural context; however, little is known about whether and to what extent business leaders actually do adjust and about the factors that influence any adjustment. This paper presents a study that investigates such aspects. Our data were collected from 391 expatriate senior managers working in China. The results of the hypotheses' testing show that the leaders significantly adjusted their leadership behaviors and that such adjustment was negatively associated with standardized IHRM strategy, and positively associated with both the control purpose of international assignment and the perception of the importance of aligning leadership behaviors to employee characteristics. The implications of the findings for research and practice are also discussed.