The study of leadership is culture-specific, and the practice of leadership is deeply attached to culture. For leadership to be effective, it must be rooted in the cultural soil of the environment where it is practiced. Owing to the crucial role played by culture, cross-cultural leadership studies have also caught the attention of many researchers in the past five decades.
Studies of leadership styles have revealed that there are not only differences in the styles preferred by followers in different national cultures but also the specific behaviours. Many communities and countries in the world are now trying to discover and explore their own system of leadership, having recognise the importance of culture in leadership. Prior studies have mainly focused on Western countries.
However, the interest in the studies of leadership in other jurisdictions is growing due to the growth of many Asian countries. For example, countries like South Korea, Singapore, Pakistan, Japan, China, and India, in terms of geography, population size and cultural influence, are currently the most important nations in Asia due to the consistent high economic growth rates over recent decades.
… we have minimal research on African countries and the preferred leadership system peculiar to its culture. This is because many African countries still operate by the western concepts they inherited under the colonial influence
As a result, an interest in studying leadership systems, culture, gender in a cross-cultural context is necessary for the foreign multinationals operating in these Asian countries and foreign nationals from North America and Europe as they live in Asia and around the world. However, we have minimal research on African countries and the preferred leadership system peculiar to its culture.
This is because many African countries still operate by the western concepts they inherited under the colonial influence. Thus, more studies are required in Africa beyond the several research presentations at conferences.
Many literature reviews on leadership styles present a wide variety of cultural differences and the reasoning for adopting one leadership style and performance between western and eastern cultures even though the eastern cultures differ.
However, putting aside the contextual factors, the phenomenon of leadership is universal in nature.
Thus, the applicability of leadership styles in different cultures and organisations, whether transactional or transformational, has universality evidence where evidence has been gathered from all continents.
The paradigms are too broad to provide a basis of measurement and inculcation; however, their effectiveness may vary with respect to cultural diversification; yet, both transactional and transformational leadership styles have the capacities to develop and sustain individual identity and meet follower’s needs for self-fulfilment through inspirational empowerment and self-worth through contingent rewards.
While studying the efficacy of leadership styles among transactional and transformational, there are incoherent results across different cultures. For instance, the impact of charismatic leadership on employee satisfaction was more significant in the American employees for whom correlations were found compared with correlations for the Mexican employees.
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American employees also generated higher correlations between conditional reward and the measures of satisfaction with work and supervision than Mexican employees. Meanwhile, in Indonesia, inspirational leaders brag about their competence to create pride and respect in themselves.
In doing so, such transformational leaders aim to reduce subordinates’ feelings of fear and shame. But it would be inappropriate for leaders to be so bragging in Japan. Hence, there are cultural contingencies in manifesting individualised consideration.
Also, it is pertinent to note that transformational leadership may be autocratic and directive or democratic and participative.
Leaders can be intellectually motivating to their followers when they authoritatively direct the followers’ attention to a hidden conjecture in their thinking.
Leaders could also be intellectually inspiring when they ask whether their group would be ready to look together for hidden assumptions.
In the individualistic societies of North America, more participative leadership would be expected of its transformational leaders.
In the collectivistic cultures of Asia, more directiveness would be expected of its transformational leaders.
How participative or directive the transformational leaders will be–how much they will depend on authority–would also depend on the issue involved. One would expect to see more authoritative transformational leadership when policy decisions rather than workplace decisions are being made.
Meanwhile, in democratic countries such as Germany, France and Australia, transformational leader behaviours are highly correlated with participation in decision making.
This implies that transformational leaders may need to be more participative to be effective in highly democratic societies. In contrast, transformational leadership may take a more command form in high power distance societies.
Similarly, the perception study of many African countries revealed interesting results where transactional leadership styles are preferred much more than transformational leadership styles.
Many incidences have shown that the level of significance of transformational leadership was positive but weaker than transactional leadership regarding employee performance, for example, in countries like Cameroon, Kenya, Nigeria and DR Congo, where power distance and uncertainty are high. Thus, transactional leadership is more suited to achieving targets.
These are bureaucratic nations where one-man show rules and autocratic leadership follows throughout history. Hence, followers and employees assume that their leader will be strict and follow the rules and regulations.
Consequently, most private organisations prefer to motivate their employees by using transactional rewards such as promotions, bonuses, punishments, etc… However, the trend is slowly changing and moving towards the transformational leadership style with time.
However, the performance level is still low compared to transactional leadership because employees feel relaxed when they come to know that their leader is not going to punish them.
Thus, the optimal combination of transformational and transactional styles is crucial due to variability and differences in applying these leadership styles. After all, in the present article, the latent construct of culture is a function of both the positive impact of transformational style and the negative effect of transactional style.
