اثرات رهبری مهاجران ارشد در نوآوری و نقش هوش فرهنگی

We propose that senior expatriates’ visionary–transformational leadership influences the rate of innovation adoption in the organizations or units they head, but cultural intelligence moderates this relationship. Our hypotheses were tested with data from 153 senior expatriate managers and 695 subordinates from companies in all 27 countries of the European Union. We found a direct influence of senior expatriates’ visionary–transformational leadership on the rate of innovation adoption. Cultural intelligence moderates the effect of senior expatriates’ leadership on organizational innovation, but not on product-market innovation. Implications for academic research and business practice are discussed.

Expatriate managers play a critical role in the ability of multinational corporations (MNCs) to transfer managerial expertise and technology as well as maintain control over subsidiaries spread across the globe (Harzing, 2001; Minbaeva & Michailova, 2004). MNCs usually appoint expatriates at higher ranks at local subsidiaries and assign them a wide range of responsibilities depending on the strategy of the respective MNC. Senior expatriate managers are in effect the heads of their organizational units—they have the primary administrative responsibility for their business units and are in charge of all activities of the respective subsidiaries or international joint ventures. The performance of senior expatriates is vital for the successful functioning of organizational units at local and regional levels and may affect the MNC overall. The need for senior expatriate managers to exercise effective leadership is critical. Recently, research has elucidated various aspects of expatriate management, such as attributes affecting expatriate performance (Tung, 1998a), staffing issues (Collings, Scullion, & Morley, 2007; Tung, 1998b), careers (Stahl, Miller, & Tung, 2002; Vance, 2005), and effectiveness (Kim & Slocum, 2008; Sunkyu & Gentry, 2005). At the same time, the literature appears to have neglected the senior expatriates’ leadership behaviors and their role for achieving important organizational outcomes. Thus, there is a gap between the literature on expatriate management and leadership research. Sustained innovation is one of the most powerful sources of competitive advantage and successful business performance (Ireland & Hitt, 1999). Contemporary MNCs depend on continued innovation, broadly understood as a process of generating and implementing new ideas. The success of innovation is a function of various macro-level and micro-level factors, key among which is leadership (Mumford & Licuanan, 2004). While effective leadership per se is not sufficient for innovation to be carried out, its presence improves the odds of innovation success. Leadership is within the company's control. MNCs can encourage appropriate leadership practices that sustain innovation processes and promote a culture which espouses innovation: encouraging experimenting, fostering collaboration, and setting successful innovations as positive examples. Innovation often involves profound organizational changes calling for managers to engage in visionary–transformational leadership in order to inspire followers and to mobilize their best efforts (Kouzes & Pozner, 1987). The precise mechanisms through which visionary–transformational leadership contributes to the important organizational processes of learning and innovation remain underinvestigated in leadership research in general (Vera & Crossan, 2004), and even more so with respect to senior expatriates. The literature on expatriate management has neglected conspicuously the issue of senior expatriate visionary–transformational leadership, not to mention the way it influences innovation. The first research question that this paper seeks to address is: Does visionary–transformational leadership exercised by senior expatriate managers affect innovation in the organizational units they head? If senior expatriate visionary–transformational leadership influences organization's innovativeness, what factors are important for this relationship? In the MNC, expatriate managers by definition work with others of different cultural profiles, building complex networks of interpersonal relations across different countries and nationalities (Manev & Stevenson, 2001; Tung, 1998a). To transcend these cultural boundaries, senior expatriates need cultural intelligence (Peterson, 2004; Thomas & Inkson, 2004), or “capability for successful adaptation to […] unfamiliar settings attributed to cultural context” (Earley & Ang, 2003: 9). We focus on cultural intelligence as a recently developed concept that has potent implications for the study of leadership by highlighting attributes that could enhance a senior expatriate leader's effectiveness in innovating under culturally diverse situations. Our second research question is whether cultural intelligence of senior expatriates moderates the relationship between their visionary–transformational leadership and innovation, and if so, how. In this paper, we focus on the actual rate of innovation adoption, reflecting a company's commitment to assimilate innovations continually over time (Damanpour & Gopalakrishnan, 2001). Through innovation, firms create and sustain competitive advantages that enable their survival and successful performance. We argue that senior expatriate managers’ visionary–transformational leadership behaviors are positively related to the rate of innovation adoption in the organizational units they head. In addition, we propose that senior expatriate managers with higher cultural intelligence have the potential to improve their organizations’ innovativeness to a greater degree than those with lower cultural intelligence (often abbreviated CQ). The main premise of this study is that CQ is an important characteristic of senior expatriate leaders who strive to improve their companies’ competitiveness through innovation. Our study has been influenced substantially by the Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness (GLOBE) project, the most comprehensive investigation to date of the relationship of cultural variables with leadership at multiple levels of analysis: societal, organizational and group (House, Hanges, Javidan, Dorfman, & Gupta, 2004). Starting with 23 leadership styles, the GLOBE project eventually identified six global leader behavior dimensions, among which is charismatic/value-based leadership, which epitomizes visionary, transformational, and inspirational leadership. We extend and complement the GLOBE project by focusing on the micro, individual and organizational levels of analysis, i.e., how, in a context characterized by constant cross-cultural interactions, differences in cultural intelligence of individual senior expatriate managers influence the effect of their visionary–transformational leadership on innovation at the organizational level. We investigate the research questions by collecting and analyzing data from the European Union (EU) countries. The EU is the largest economic entity in the world, with 27 member countries, population of 495 million people, and a GDP of about €11.6 trillion (Eurostat Yearbook, 2008). The great cultural diversity in the EU offers excellent basis for academic studies of the importance of managers’ ability to transcend cultural differences epitomized by the CQ concept. The paper is organized as follows. We first present a review of the literatures on leadership and innovation. On this basis, we develop a proposition about the effect of senior expatriates’ visionary–transformational leadership behaviors on the rate of innovation adoption. Next we review the rapidly developing literature on cultural intelligence and formulate a proposition about its moderating role for the relationship between senior expatriate visionary–transformational leadership and the rate of innovation adoption. Further, we describe the method, study sample, and measures. We proceed with reporting the results of the statistical tests and finally discuss their implications for academic research and managerial practice.

This study has shown that visionary–transformational leadership behaviors of senior expatriate managers strongly influence the rate of adoption of both product-market and organizational innovation in a multi-cultural context. Our paper contributes to the burgeoning literature of the role of leadership for innovation (Howell & Avolio, 1993; Jung et al., 2003 and Krause, 2004; Mumford & Licuanan, 2004) by demonstrating the robust effect that visionary–transformational leadership has on the rate of innovation adoption. The findings reported here are based on data from 27 countries providing important evidence for the widespread cultural endorsement and effectiveness of visionary–transformational leadership. This outcome of our investigation is consistent with the results of the GLOBE project, indicating that charismatic/value-based leadership generally contributes to outstanding leadership (Javidan, Dorfman, de Luque, & House, 2006: 73). This study also makes a contribution to the rapidly growing research in international management on expatriates and the reasons for their success or failure. We find that visionary–transformational leadership of senior expatriate managers matters considerably. This appears to be a strong factor affecting the likelihood for both product-market and organizational innovations to succeed in the subsidiaries headed by the respective senior expatriates. While we report results based on the Kouzes and Posner's (1987) theory of visionary–transformational leadership in this study, a positive association between the leadership of senior expatriate managers and innovation is not likely to be method-specific. We believe that inspirational motivation, idealized influence, individualized consideration, and intellectual stimulation, behaviors in the Full-Range Theory of Leadership (Avolio, 1999, Bass, 1985 and Bass, 1998), are also positively associated with innovation. We found that cultural intelligence played a moderating role in the relationship of visionary–transformational leadership and the rate of organizational innovation. A heightened cultural intelligence clearly magnifies the positive effect of expatriate leadership on that kind of innovation. Cross-nationally diverse contexts require expatriate leaders to interact and empathize with followers with different cultural background and identity. Senior expatriate managers with higher CQ are likely to motivate, inspire, and direct followers more effectively, overcome intraorganizational obstacles, and promote organizational innovation. Our study supports the idea that the effect of leadership on important organizational outcomes is contingent on the cultural intelligence capacity of senior expatriates. We extend the multilevel analysis of the role of culture on leadership advanced in the GLOBE study (House et al., 2004) by exploring the role of senior expatriate leadership, a variable at the individual level, in cross-cultural settings and linking it with an important organizational outcome—innovation. The present paper suggests that cultural intelligence, a relatively new concept, holds particular promise for elucidating the leadership behaviors of effective senior expatriates in culturally diverse contexts. Importantly, CQ focuses on the individual level of analysis, thus avoiding the ecological fallacy for which some concepts of culture at the macro level have been criticized. At the same time, the concept of cultural intelligence appears to offer a plausible mechanism through which socio-cultural values affect individual perceptions, motivation, and behavior. CQ matters for leadership and innovation both through its individual components (cognitive, meta-cognitive, motivational, and behavioral) and in their totality. From the standpoint of research on expatriate effectiveness, the ability to be sensitive to changing conditions within a multi-cultural setting and be flexible to accordingly modify behaviors (behavioral CQ) proved to be crucially important for enhancing the leadership effectiveness of senior expatriate managers. Following our statistical analyses (Table 5), the same can be said (although to a somewhat smaller degree) about the specific knowledge that senior expatriates would be able to gain and comprehend about their cultural environment based on discernable cues (cognitive CQ). It is intriguing to note that meta-cognitive CQ and motivational CQ interact differentially with visionary–transformational leadership behaviors. Cultural self-awareness and the ability to access and analyze one's own perception, thinking and interpretation (meta-cognitive CQ) appear to be of particular importance for augmenting the effectiveness of the senior expatriate leader's ability to set example for his or her followers’ behavior through actions that are consistent with their espoused values (modeling the way), fostering collaboration and building trust among followers (enabling others to act), and providing positive feedback and acknowledgement to celebrate followers’ contributions (encouraging the heart). Similarly, senior expatriates’ inner drive and determination to satisfy the need to learn about cultural differences in varying situations and act on this knowledge (motivational CQ) turn out to be highly relevant. A convincing vision for the future that would motivate followers to perform their best to achieve it (inspiring a shared vision) and the extent to which a senior expatriate leader would question basic organizational assumptions, or would experiment, or would take risks (challenging the process) leads to innovation. Thus, cultural intelligence holds great promise for more comprehensive understanding of the effectiveness of senior expatriate leadership in cross-cultural contexts.