On the generality of leadership style measures across cultures* (original) (raw)

1989, Journal of Occupational Psychology

I t is proposed that cross-cultural studies of leadership style have failed to distinguish adequately between global characterizations of style and the specific behaviours which leaders need to use in a given culture if a particular style is to be attributed to them. A study is reported of perceptions of electronics plant supervisors in Britain, the USA, Japan and Hong Kong, derived from Misumi's PM leadership theory. The findings indicate that characterizations of P(Performance) and M(Maintenance) leader style have a similar factor structure in each culture. However, the specific behaviours associated with those styles differ markedly, in ways which are comprehensible within the cultural norms ofeach setting. The study illustrates how a series of emic correlations within each culture sample may be used to test the validity of etic models of leader style. Research into styles of leadership has been dominated for several decades by a series of distinctions among different types of leader. While such distinctions clearly date back to the studies by Lewin, Lippitt & White (1939), the most enduring typology has been that provided by the Ohio State University researchers (Fleishman, 1953) with their distinction between consideration and initiating structure. Contemporary thinking has moved rather sharply away from the oversimple notion that a global measure of leader style could by itself account for any substantial amount of the variance in subordinate performance, and the Ohio State measures have been shown to be defective in a variety of ways (Schriesheim & Kerr, 1974). Nonetheless, leader style continues to figure largely in the various conceptualizations of person-situation interaction which are seen as providing a A version of chis paper was presented at the 2 l s t International Congress of Applied Psychology, Jerusalem, July 1986. t Requests for reprints. 98 Peter B. Smith et al. more adequate model of the influence processes surrounding leaders. For instance, the leader may select that style which facilitates the subordinate's path towards a goal (House, 197 I), the style appropriate to a particular decision (Vroom & Yetton, 1973), or the style congruent with a particular attribution about a subordinate's behaviour (Green & Mitchell. 1979). Alternatively, the leader may be seen by subordinates as embodying a certain style because of prior success (Phillips & Lord, 198 l), or as using differing styles in relation to the varying members of a role set (Smith & Peterson, 1988). The attractiveness of the concept of leader style clearly lies in the possibility of labelling and objectifying an otherwise confusing diversity of behaviours. Such precision would be particularly attractive if it permitted us to make generalizations about leader behaviours within differing organizations or even different cultural contexts. This paper takes the position that in order to understand a given leadership style it must be examined both in terms of general structure and of specific expression (Misumi, 1985; Misumi & Peterson, 1985). In other words, there may well be certain underlying universal structures to the way a leader's behaviour is interpreted, which are 'general' or inherent in the nature of leader-subordinate relationships. However, the skilful leader will need to express these general structures in a variable manner, which is affected by numerous factors in the specific environment. If this could be established, then one could anticipate that, while general measures of leader style might yield uniform relations with criterion measures in a wide variety of settings, more specific analysis would show that the nature of the relationships obtained in each setting was comprehensible only in terms of the interpretive framework extant within that setting at that time. Thus general findings would be both 'true', but also only meaningful in a given setting in the light of other much more specific information. In testing these propositions it is important to bear in mind that no measure can be devised which is entirely general or entirely specific, since the formulation of all measures is influenced to some degree both by widely shared notions about the nature of leadership and by cultural and linguistic conventions obtaining in the settings where a measure is formulated. However, it is intended to demonstrate that some measures have a more general emphasis while others are more culturally specific. The scientific paradigm in fashion in psychology until recent times has ensured that the various widely used measures of leader style were construed with the aim of being applicable to as wide a range of settings as possible in order to enhance their external validity. Consequently, questionnaire items were selected which were worded in a vague andgeneral manner, which now appears methodologically weak. For instance, typical items from the Ohio State research were: 'Is your supervisor friendly and approachable?' and 'Does your supervisor talk about how much should be done?'. Such items are clearly general in emphasis. The first does not touch upon questions such as how the supervisor in a particular setting would signal friendliness or approachability.It could well prove that in one setting the supervisor's physical presence for a high proportion of the day would indicate his or her approachability, while in others the crucial signal could be willingness to be interrupted, amount of smiling, or out-of-hours contact. The second Ohio State item fails to address the question of how frequently the supervisor talks about how much should be done, or by whom. Furthermore, there are a dozen possible ways in which a supervisor might talk about how much should be done. Difficulties in conceptualizing the possible divergence between general style and the