Cultural Leadership

Abstract

Cultural leadership is a diverse subject to touch upon. This aspect of leadership is constantly growing and changing. People should not look into cultural leadership with biased opinions. Dividing cultural leadership into sub groups just gives people an opinion on how to look at people differently. Cultural leadership should be looked at as a whole, as we are one, working together, with the same goal - to be successful. Cultural leadership profiles are used to classify what followers expect from leaders in ten cultures - cluster groups comprising of sixty-two countries. Six different leadership behavior classifications are used to show what profile is dominant in varying strengths in each region.

A successful leader involves more than just planning, coordinate, managing and supervising. A successful leader also has the ability to deal with all genres of people. Whether in involves ethnicity, sexual orientation or people with different cultures. The success of an organization is highly impacted by its culture, which is part of a strategic planning of an organization.

What is culture? Culture is defined as the universally shared beliefs, values, and norms of a group of people. Two factors that can hinder cultural awareness are ethnocentrism and prejudice. It is challenging for leaders because it averts them from fully understanding the world of others. Prejudice has a negative impression because it is self-orientated and restrains leaders from seeing the many sides and qualities of others. Whatever makes them unique is their culture. Having a clear understanding of one's culture, communicating with each other will be much more efficient.

Culture has been the attention of many findings across a variety of principles. In the past 30 years a significant number of studies have focused on specifically on ways to recognize and categorize the various dimensions of culture. Determining the rudimentary dimensions or charismas of different cultures is the first step in being able to recognize the relationships between them.

Ever since World War II, globalization has been progressing throughout the world. Globalization is the increased interdependence (economic, social, technical, and political) between nations. People are becoming more interconnected. There is an increasingly significant amount of international trade, cultural exchange, and use of worldwide telecommunication systems. In the past ten years, our schools, organizations, and communities have become a lot more global. Increased globalization has created many challenges as well, for example the need to design effective multinational organizations, to identify and select appropriate leaders, and to manage organizations with culturally distinctly different employees. Globalization has also fashioned a need to understand how cultural differences affect the leadership performances.

Globalization also created the requirement for leaders to become knowledgeable in cross-cultural awareness and practice. First, leaders need to understand business, political, and cultural settings worldwide. Second, they should learn the perspectives, tastes, trends, and technologies of multiple cultures. Third, they basically need to be able to work concurrently with people from many cultures. Fourth, leaders must be able to familiarize to living and communicating in other cultures. Fifth, they need to acquire to relate to people from other cultures from a position of equivalence rather than cultural supremacy.

Anthropologists, sociologists, and many others have questioned the meaning of the word culture. Because it is a theoretical term, it is hard to define, and many different people often define it in unrelated ways. Here, culture is defined as the learned beliefs, values, rules, norms, symbols, and traditions that are common to a group of people. It is these shared qualities of a group that make them matchless. In summary, culture is the way of life, different customs, and script of a group of peoples.

Related to culture, are the expressions of multicultural and diversity. Multicultural indicates an approach or classification that takes more than one culture into interpretation. It mentions to the existence of multiple cultures such an African, American, Asian, European, and Middle Eastern. Multicultural can also denote to a set of subcultures defined by race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or age. Diversity signifies to the subsistence of different cultures or ethnicities within a group or organization.

Ethnocentrism is the inclination for beings to place their own group (ethnic, racial, cultural) at the center of their interpretations of others and the world. People tend to give importance and value to their own beliefs, attitudes, and values, over and above other groups. Ethnocentrism is the sensitivity that one's own culture is better or more expected than the culture of others. Ethnocentrism is a worldwide tendency, and each and every one of us is ethnocentric to some degree. Ethnocentrism can be a major impediment to effective leadership because it averts people from fully understanding and/or respecting the perspectives of others. The more ethnocentric we are, the less open or accepting we are of other people's cultural customs and practices.

Prejudice is a general continual attitude, belief, or emotion believed by an individual about another individual or group that is based on defective or unproven statistics. It refers to assumptions about others based on previous decisions or occurrences. Prejudice involves obstinate generalizations that are impervious or change or evidence to the opposing. Prejudice is often thought in the framework of race. In addition to combating their own prejudice, leaders also face the experiment of dealing with the prejudice of followers. These prejudices can be toward the manager or the leader's culture. Additionally, it is not infrequent for the leader to face followers who symbolize several culturally different groups, and these groups have their own prejudgments toward each other. A experienced leader needs to find ways to negotiate with followers from numerous cultural backgrounds.

Training programs about culture and diversity have been admired for many years. At the center of these programs, people are educated about the degrees and characteristics of different cultures, and how to be perceptive to people in other countries and cultures. Considerate about issues about culture is useful in several ways. The discoveries about culture can help leaders recognize their own cultural biases and inclinations. Tolerant of their own preferences is the first step in accepting that people in other cultures might have different