Leadership Blog
The greater conflict for leaders lies in the priority they assign to virtues and how they influence the big and small decisions
We’ve often heard it said that there are two things certain in life – “taxes, and death.” While there are many things we could add to the list, there is one thing that many would find difficult to object to: Conflict. Conflict is both inevitable and pervasive and is intricately...
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The role of culture in leadership formation and how the adoption of certain virtues stimulates new areas of research
The discussion and debate on the notion of virtue continues to be just as relevant today for modern leadership as it has been over the centuries. In a series of essays we have established the importance of leadership virtues, and how their absence can cause considerable harm to their followers...
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How does culture influence an organization’s future-orientation?
The fifth and final cultural dimension is long-term versus short-term orientation; the GLOBE study calls it “future orientation.”[1] In building this construct, Hofstede, Hofstede, and Minkov, incorporated specific findings from the Chinese Value Survey (CVS) that was administered to students from twenty-three countries. In total, it measured 40 Chinese values...
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How cultures deal differently with uncertainty
The fourth cultural dimension analyzed by Hofstede, Hofstede, and Minkov, is uncertainty avoidance. This measures levels of tolerance in relation to ambiguity. While each member of society in every culture will at one time or another confront uncertainty, they must discover ways to manage it. One of the ways they...
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Measuring masculinity-femininity as a dimension of culture
The third of five cultural dimensions highlighted by Hofstede is assertiveness versus modesty. This is used to measure gender or masculinity-femininity as a dimension of societal culture, and the roles each culture assigns to them. This especially influences how leadership is exercised, and how it is perceived by its recipients....
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How do ‘individualist’ cultures behave differently to ‘collective’ ones?
We’ve been looking at the impact of national culture on leadership formation and how certain virtues are adopted and practiced. Individualist versus collective societies represent the second of five cultural dimensions that measures the power of the individual or group within that culture. This has nothing to do with the power of the state over...
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How cultures and leaders deal with inequalities differently
The first cultural dimension of the ‘Hofstede five’ we will consider is that of power-distance. Simply, it reflects how countries tend to deal with inequalities. To measure this the Power Distance Index (PDI) was created. Three questions were used to compose the survey: the first seeking to understand if the employee...
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Understanding cultural dimensions and their implications for leading
Realizing the important role of culture in shaping our values, thinking, and behavior, numerous scholars have sought to define different dimensions of culture to help address some of the problems common to all societies. In 1954, Alex Inkeles and Daniel Levinson suggested that there existed three basic problems that held...
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How does national culture impact organizational culture?
The virtues of a leader shape his or her vision of the world, and as a consequence, the way leadership is perceived and practiced. But these are not developed in a vacuum. The impact of a person’s culture, and cultural norms (or standards of behavior) are major determinants of behaviors,...
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How does culture shape leaders and the virtues they adopt?
In numerous articles, I have addressed the importance of virtues in a leader’s life, and how the degree to which they are absent or present can define that leader’s character and the impact it will have on his or her ability to lead others. There is a considerable difference between...
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