Leadership, values and communication: a cross-cultural investigation of the extended full-range of leadership behaviors

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the extended full-range of leadership model – including laissez-faire, transactional, transformational, and instrumental leadership – in 14 cultures. Cross-cultural leadership has increasingly attracted the attention of practitioners as well as scholars in recent years due to important challenges that international firms are facing on the global market. The aim of this dissertation is, thus, to examine cultural impacts on leader behaviors in relation to the leadership styles of the extended full-range of leadership framework to provide a comprehensive model of leadership behaviors, underlying processes (mediators), and conditions (moderators) in an intercultural context. For this purpose, three complementary and concerted empirical studies were carried out. The first study simultaneously explores all of the extended full-range of leadership styles (laissez-faire, transactional, transformational, and instrumental leadership) to identify which of these leader behaviors are most effective to enhance job satisfaction and affective commitment across cultures. The second study sheds light on the influence of cultural and individual openness values as moderators in order to investigate under which conditions the influence of transformational and instrumental leadership is particularly strong. The third study looks at the leader’s communicator style as a mediator to investigate the underlying processes of transformational and instrumental leadership in greater detail. In summary, this dissertation represents an important step towards a more robust understanding of the effectiveness of the extended full-range of leader behaviors across cultures. It contributes to the leadership literature in two key ways. On the one hand, it scrutinizes the extended full-range of leadership model – including instrumental leadership – in a wide range of different cultures. On the other hand, it expands this model in the sense of an input-process-output model which additionally includes boundary conditions. As such, this dissertation helps to reveal differentiated insights on underlying processes and conditions that shape the micro-level dynamics of leadership processes in different cultures. The main result of this dissertation is that – in line with theoretical expectations – transformational and instrumental leadership were the best predictors for job satisfaction and affective commitment across cultures. Moreover, although culture did not impact the direct relationships between transformational and instrumental leadership and job attitudes, more fine-grained analyses showed that culture had an influence on micro-processes of leadership.