رهبری تحول گرا: ارتباط آن با ابعاد ارزش فرهنگ

This study examines the relationships between overall transformational leadership, as well as its five aspects (challenging the process, inspiring a shared vision, enabling others to act, modeling the way and encouraging the hearth) as identified by Kouzes and Posner, and Hofstede's culture value dimensions by investigating the responses of Pakistani, Kazakh and Turkish business students. The evaluation of the responses indicates that a significant and negative relationship exists between the uncertainty avoidance culture value dimension and overall transformational leadership. Further analysis revealed that some aspects of transformational leadership are found to be common, whereas others are culture-specific. The transformational leadership aspects such as challenging the process and enabling others to act were not found to be related to any of the culture value dimensions. Inspiring a shared vision and modeling the way were significantly and negatively related to uncertainty avoidance while encouraging the hearth was positively related to power distance.

Considerable research on leader behavior has been done in a variety of disciplines and in recent years, scholars and practitioners have increasingly focused on the emotional and symbolic aspects of leadership (Zagorsek, 2004). These aspects are built around similar leader behavior and are called as “neocharismatic theories” (House & Aditya, 1997), or simply “transformational theories”. This new leadership theory expands the role of the charismatic leader who has considerable emotional appeal to followers and great power over them. Transformational leaders increase their followers’ self-efficacy, which is an important motivational construct increasing followers’ belief in their capability to organize and execute the actions required to attain a given goal (Shamir, House, & Arthur, 1993). In fact, it is generally accepted in transformational leadership that leaders persuade other members of the organization to provide support for the innovation (Hofstede, 2001). Transformational leadership theories seem to be the most advanced in the sense that they expand the scope of leadership theory by recognizing the importance of symbolic, emotional and highly motivating behaviors that appeal to follower's minds and hearts and account for results over and above ordinary leadership. Transformational leadership principles appear first in the work of Weber (1923/1963) on charismatic leadership. Then, Burns (1978) specified the distinction between transactional leaders who attempt to satisfy the current needs of followers by focusing attention on exchanges and transformational leaders who attempt to raise the need of followers and promote dramatic changes of individuals, groups, or organizations for the first time in 1978 (Yammarino & Bass, 1990). Bass (1997) asserts that as transformational leadership is universally effective across cultures, this century's dominant workforce consists of knowledgeable employees who need the envisioning and empowering which transformational leaders can provide. With increasing globalization, it is quite understandable that common technological imperatives, common industrial logic, and global technologies and institutions serve to harmonize management practices (Zagorsek, 2004). Therefore, global managers need universally valid leadership theories and principles that transcend cultures. Thus, it is expected that there will be some similarities in beliefs regarding effective leaders’ behavior across cultures. However, some studies in many different societies show that transformational leadership is closer to perceptions of ideal leadership (Bass & Avolio, 1990), and some writers claim that there are universal tendencies in leadership, which support the culture-universal position (Bass & Avolio, 1993). On the other hand, many researchers support the argument that the application of leadership theories may differ around the world and theories developed in the United States are limited in their applicability to other cultures (Hofstede (1980) and Hofstede (1993); Smith & Peterson, 1988). In some studies, partial evidence was found for transformational leadership universality (Den Hartog, House, Hanges, Ruiz-Quintanilla, & Dorfman, 1999; Posner & Harder, 2002; Zagorsek, Marko, & Stanley, 2004). Thus, some researchers suggest that leadership is both a universal and a culture-specific phenomenon (Bass, 1997; Dorfman & Howell, 1997; Peterson & Hunt, 1997). House, Wright, and Aditya (1997) asserted that there are some universal leadership phenomena but that there are also differences in culturally approved implicit theories of leadership. According to the GLOBE's project, each culture develops its own culturally implicit theory (CLT) of leadership. In summarizing their results, Javidan et al. (2004) stated that the CLTs will be different to the extent that cultures are different. Although some researchers asserted that transformational leadership is universally effective across cultures, and some study results revealed that there are some similarities in transformational leadership practices across countries, other researchers found that transformational leadership practices may not be equally likely to occur in all cultures. These researchers argued that the uncritical adaptation of transformational leadership practices evolved in the context of western cultures might not be effective in other cultural environments. Unlike most of the previous researches that mainly focused on the transformational leadership practice differences in various countries without evaluating their culture value dimensions, this research is carried out to understand whether specific culture value dimensions might affect the transformational leadership and its aspects on the data collected from culturally heterogeneous sample. The specific aims of this research are: 1. To identify the relationship between overall transformational leadership and culture value dimensions. 2. To identify the role of culture value dimensions in each of the transformational leadership aspects.

This study was designed to examine the relationship between transformational leadership and culture value dimensions and clarify to what extent different culture value dimensions influence different aspects of transformational leadership. One of the major findings of this study, according to the responses given by the participant students, was that there is a significant and negative relationship between the uncertainty avoidance dimension of culture and overall transformational leadership. This result supports previous studies which found that high uncertainty avoidance societies have lower preferences for the transformational leader role than lower uncertainty societies (e.g. Jung et al., 1995; Koopman et al., 1999; Offermann & Hellmann, 1997; Shane (1993) and Shane (1995)). This seems reasonable when one considers that people who have a positive attitude toward ambiguous and unstructured situations may tolerate innovation that will take them beyond their self-interests for the good of the organization or society by making them aware of the importance of the desired future state. On the other hand, the emphasis on questioning old assumptions, traditions and beliefs, new ways of doing things that are radically different from the status quo, taking personal risks might increase the stress level and the feeling of discomfort people who are used to having hierarchical control roles, the power of superiors and highly formalized management concept. Moreover, in high uncertainty avoidance cultures, self-efficacy is low and members of those cultures do not attribute achievements to their own ability; thus, leaders might be inadequate to increase their followers’ self-efficacy, which is accepted as an important motivational construct for transformational leadership. Another important finding obtained from this study is that some of the transformational leadership aspects (namely, inspiring a shared vision, modeling the way and encouraging the hearth) were found to be significantly related to certain culture value dimensions. Specifically, a negative relationship was found between the uncertainty avoidance dimension of culture and the inspiring a shared vision and modeling the way aspects of transformational leadership. These explain which aspects of transformational leadership are related to uncertainty avoidance. Inspiring a shared vision is that leaders persuade others in the organizations to provide support for the innovation and it is about envisioning the future. In other words, it involves imagining an exciting highly attractive future for the organization and desiring to change the way things are in order to create something that no one else has ever done before, which is related to innovation. This result supports the research results by some scholars asserting that the culture values of people in some societies make those societies more likely to be innovative and inventive (Kedia, Keller, & Julian, 1992; Shane (1992) and Shane (1993)). Moreover, Shane (1995) asserts that uncertainty-accepting societies may be more innovative than uncertainty-avoiding societies. Although the reason for this result might be that in high uncertainty avoidance societies there is resistance to change and a tendency toward preferring tasks with sure outcomes, avoiding risks and following instructions. On the other hand, in order to avoid overgeneralization, one should consider other factors (e.g. participation of employees, delegation, providing a secure working environment) that might be important to encourage change and innovation. The other transformational leadership aspect negatively related to the uncertainty avoidance dimension was modeling the way. This aspect is all about leading and going first by setting an example through daily actions that demonstrate deep commitment to one's beliefs. The members of high uncertainty avoidance societies are brought up on the importance of obeying rules, stressing strong security, avoiding failure, protecting oneself from the unknown. Therefore, it is difficult to imagine that the leaders who are the members of those societies would model the way toward the unknown. According to the results obtained from this study, encouraging the hearth aspect of transformational leadership is positively related to the power distance of culture value dimension. The finding of this study seems to contradict the assumption that in high power distance cultures negative attitudes toward authoritarian leadership should be less common (e.g. Den Hartog et al., 1999). When one considers encouraging the hearth aspect of transformational leadership—which is about genuine acts of caring, uplifting the spirits, drawing people forward, showing appreciation for people's contribution, recognizing them and celebrating their success—one might understand that such behavior upgrades a person, making others consider him/her a powerful and benevolent decision maker. In high power distance cultures, receiving encouragement and recognition from the leader is valued. According to Bass (1985), many respondents indicated that the transformational leader which they could identify in their own careers was like a benevolent father who remained friendly yet could be formal and firm and would reprimand followers when necessary. The last finding of this study is that two transformational leadership aspects—namely, challenging the process and enabling others to act—were not found to be significantly related to any of the culture value dimensions. This finding seems to support the assertion of Bass and Avolio (1993), who stated that transformational leadership involves certain universal tendencies. In other words, those aspects of transformational leadership that have been found to be common across the countries studied might be accepted as cultural universals. According to these results, the challenging the process and enabling others to act aspects of transformational leadership seem to be universally relevant, whereas the inspiring a shared vision, modeling the way and encouraging the hearth aspects are culture dependent. However, in order to assert this, similar results ought to be gathered from studies involving participants from different countries. As is the case with other research, this study admittedly has certain limitations. First of all, although the data collected from the business students who are taught to become managers may not be representative of leaders working in the real business environment. Therefore, one suggestion for testing the universality and culture-specific perspectives of transformational leadership could be to investigate this issue with other samples representing other groups. Secondly, it is difficult to imagine whether respondents would actually behave in the same manner as their responses indicated regarding actual transformational leadership. Therefore, the other suggestion for further research would be to investigate the leader's behavior in real business situations especially linking the research with performance measures in real life settings. Thirdly, it was found that some culture value dimensions used in this study predicted transformational leadership and some of its aspects but accounted for only a small portion of variance. One of the reasons for this result could be that some other factors might have stronger effects on transformational leadership than the culture value dimensions included in this study. Although some aspects of transformational leadership are found to be culture dependent, the conclusion could be that these aspects are not only equally relevant in separate cultures, some other factors e.g. participating employees in decision making, providing a high quality of working life, might also be important for transformational leadership. Moreover, one has to consider criticism of Hofstede's conceptualization of some culture value dimensions (individualism and collectivism; masculinity and femininity; and long-term and short-term orientation), which have been considered as polar points of a single continuum (Ardichvili, 2001). Some writers proposed that “they are unique constructs and need to be split into separate continua and they may be multifaceted dimensions consisting of more than one component” (Ardichvili, 2001, p. 378). Therefore, it might be suggested that results ought to be gathered from similar studies using culture value dimensions other than those identified by Hofstede.