Interpreting Authentic Leadership: A Cross Cultural Comparison of A New Zealand University and Ghanaian University

Abstract

National culture theory proponents have argued that due to differences in national cultures, expectations and preferences differ and this affect prioritizations in value systems. However, the authentic leadership (AL) theory presents an authentic leader as honest, transparent and behaves with integrity regardless of culture. By presenting AL this way, the proponents of the AL theory are discounting the effects of contexts/culture in the subjective interpretations and prioritizations of individuals in explaining constructs and concepts. This study, therefore, explored and compared the preferred authentic leadership attributes from leaders' and followers' perspectives using respondents from a Ghanaian university and a New Zealand university. The Q method was used to gather information from 60 respondents, 30 in each university. The findings show that the subjects, though in different cultural contexts, have some common shared preferences for certain authentic leadership attributes. However, there were some attributes that were country specific. This suggests that though certain authentic leadership attributes are universal whereas some are context specific and therefore in defining authenticity in leadership context specific preferences cannot be overlooked. The findings of study apart from being useful in the design of training programs to training practicing and upcoming leaders in universities, has also contributed a cross cultural dimension of authentic leadership attributes to the authentic leadership theory. KeywordsNational culture, Authentic Leadership, New Zealand, Ghana IntroductıonNew challenges facing the world today has made the suitability and the applicability of the known leadership theories been questioned . There is therefore the need to come up with a model of leadership that would be suitable to meet the challenges of today"s organizations and still be relevant for the future as well. Researchers and practitioners (Bass and Steidlmeier, 1999;May et al., 2003;Harris, 2004;Avolio and Gardner, 2005;Gardner et al., 2005;Spillane, 2005;Walumbwa et al., 2008) asked for the redirection of research efforts towards the understanding of leadership practice, which they believe is revealed in leader-follower interactions rather than concentrating on the leader as an individual. Understanding leaderfollower dynamics is vital because it is within this that we can know the expectations, anticipations and reactions of leaders and followers, which are very important ingredients of organizational development. Researchers (Harris, 2004;Avolio and Gardner, 2005;Spillane, 2005), highlight the opportunities to be derived from understanding leaderfollower interactions. They suggest that inherent in the leader-follower dynamism lies collaborative and collective learning and knowledge generation which, is a strong foundation for building innovation and trust in organizations. Also the issues of integrity become evident. Gardner et al., (2005) echo that in times of rapid changes like our world today, people (em...