LEADERSHIP, PERSONAL VALUES, AND CULTURAL CONTEXT IN BRAZIL, CHINA, AND THE UNITED STATES: A PATTERN APPROACH

Informações

Código: GPR356
Divisão: GPR - Gestão de Pessoas e Relações de Trabalho
Tema de Interesse: Tema 05 - Liderança

Autores

Reed Elliot Nelson

Resumo

This research examines the association between configurations of personal values and managerialincumbency among college educated professionals in Brazil, the United States, and ethnicChinese in capitalist Asia. Two theoretical perspectives distinguish this research from traditionalstudies of leadership. First is the emerging “pattern approach” in social psychology which,instead of positing main effects to be discovered through regression or analysis of variancemodels, looks to patterned variance within individuals and within and across samples to provideinsight. Second is the increasing tendency in leadership studies to seek to understand thecontexts—be they organizational, sectoral, or national—within which leadership is defined andexercised. Both of these perspectives call for more emphasis on descriptive techniques whichfirst identify the overall contours or clusters of factors which characterize populations along withtheir relative size, and then consider the distribution of dependent variables across clusters. Bygenerating comparable clusterings of professionals in Brazil, China, and the USA, we obtain adifferent view of the relationship between individual variables, cultural setting, and leadership.Our findings provide strong indications of both convergence and divergence in the leadership ormanagerial function across cultures. We find convergence in that in each of the three culturalsettings sampled there is one cluster of personal values which is highly associated withmanagerial position, and particularly with occupation of an upper management position such asdepartmental, general or executive management. These “managerial clusters” are similar in theiroverall profile, and are the smallest clusters in each of the three countries studied, suggesting auniversalistic “managerial personality” along much the same lines that Miner posited over thirtyago. At the same time, we find significant differences between countries in the absolutenumerical levels of values held by managers and even greater differences in the levels of valuesfound the clusters which characterize their subordinates. By taking a pattern approach toleadership and culture, we are exposed to a radical change of perspective. Instead of seeingleadership as either universal or idiosyncratic to cultural context, we see leadership as stableacross cultures, but embedded in clusters of contrasting values which vary across nations, butwhich also reflect common universal archetypes. This view is at once similar and different tothat the GLOBE studies. The GLOBE studies, which use a more traditional “maineffects/interaction effects” view, identify a core of leadership behaviors that are universallydesired, and a subset of leadership behaviors that are idiosyncratic to cultural areas. Our study,however modest, offers a different view by identifying a core of individual managerial values thatinteract with other clusters of values which in turn share commonalities and differences acrossnations.

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