Leadership styles: The role of cultural intelligence

Abstract

Orientation: Within both the South African context and abroad, leaders are increasingly being required to engage with staff members whose cultures differ from their own. As the attractiveness of different leadership styles varies in line with staff member cultural preferences, the challenge leaders face is that their behaviours may no longer be apposite. To this end, it is mostly unknown whether those leaders who are deemed culturally intelligent behave in a specific manner, that is, display the empowering and directive leadership styles.Research purpose: The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between leader cultural intelligence and the empowering and directive styles of leadership, as perceived by subordinates.Motivation for the study: To operate successfully, leaders need to adopt and display those leadership styles that best match the cultural expectations of their staff members. Cultural intelligence may assist in this respect. Most of the studies on leader cultural intelligence and leadership styles have concentrated on the transformational leadership style. There is, thus, a requirement to examine how leader cultural intelligence relates to other leadership styles.Research design, approach and method: The study was quantitative in nature and made use of a cross-sectional survey design. Data were collected from 1140 staff members spread across 19 diverse organisations carrying on business activities in South Africa. Correlation and regression techniques were performed to identify relationships.Main findings: Leader cultural intelligence was found to have a stronger relationship with empowering leadership than it had with directive leadership. With empowering leadership, leader metacognitive and motivational cultural intelligence acted as important antecedents, whilst for directive leadership, leader’s motivational, cognitive and metacognitive cultural intelligence played a predictive part that carried a medium effect.Practical/managerial implications: The findings can be used by organisations to guide the selection of leaders and to focus initiatives for their development.Contribution and value-add: The study adds to the cultural intelligence and leadership literature by offering empirical evidence of the relationship between leader cultural intelligence and the empowering and directive leadership styles.

Leadership and Commitment to Service Quality in Pakistani Hospitals: The Contingent Role of Role Clarity

“…According to Clark et al (2009), leadership is "the manner and approach for providing direction, implementing plans, and motivating people" (p. 1). Importantly, transformational, transactional, and laissez-faire are reported as some of the most widely practiced leadership styles for galvanizing employee behaviors and fostering positive outcomes (Afifah & Daud, 2018;Anderson & Sun, 2017;Chang et al, 2019;Chiniara & Bentein, 2018;Cummings et al, 2010;Han et al, 2016;Huertas-Valdivia et al, 2019;Miao et al, 2018;Skakon et al, 2010;Solomon & Steyn, 2017). Burns (1978) has defined transformational leaders as the one capable of nurturing followers up from their petty preoccupations and rally them around a common purpose to achieve things never thought possible.…”

Hype or hope? A new look at the research on cultural intelligence

“…However, Grand et al (2013) and Collins et al (2016) did not find that CQ has predictive power for these objective results. CQ can also be positively connected to interrelationship variables, such as group acceptance for newcomers (Joardar, Kostova, & Ravlinet, 2007) and different leadership styles (Ramsey, Rutti, Lorenz, Barakat, & Sant'anna, 2017;Solomon & Steyn, 2017).…”

“…Overall, CQ has been linked to transformational leadership, which emphasizes offering followers a vision and inspiring them by acting as role models (Ramsey et al, 2017), while Solomon and Steyn (2017) found that leaders' metacognitive CQ and motivational CQ are better predictors for empowering leadership (i.e., focus on assigning authority and responsibilities to followers) than for directive leadership (i.e., emphasizing precise goals and instructions). Young, Haffejee, and Corsun (2017) found that overall CQ and all dimensions of CQ, with the exception of cognitive CQ, are negatively related to ethnocentrism.…”

Intercultural Contact as a Predictor of Cultural Intelligence

“…Cultural intelligence is defined as the ability of effective adaptation in different cultural environments (Ang, Van Dyne, & Rockstuhl, 2015;Earley, 2002) the ability to adapt to others (Ng & Earley, 2006) and to various cultural situations (Ang, Van Dyne, & Koh, 2006), i.e., cultural empathy (Ridley & Lingle, 1996) and is motivated by the real practice of globalization both in the workplace (Earley & Ang, 2003) and in the society. Thus, a high level of cultural intelligence allows the adaptation and modeling of behavior, before the contact with people from different cultural areas (Solomon & Steyn, 2017). Cultural intelligence is a set of capabilities and skills that allow us to interpret behaviors and situations that are unfamiliar, as well as, identify behaviors that are universal to all mankind, behaviors that are cultural and behaviors that are idiosyncratic to one particular individual in a specific situation (Van Dyne, Ang, & Livermore, 2010).…”