Culture Influence on Leadership Processes - Essay Example

?How does culture influence on leadership processes Introduction Culture is an integral part of everyone’s life because it is integrated with everybody’s experience on the day to day situation in every walk of life. It is not easy to deal with things related with culture. Leadership and culture are among of the most important issues that usually considered in the academe and even in the business world. Leadership especially in the case of international organisation is a very important issue because it highly regards culture as one the most important components for the success of the operation in a world-wide coverage. In this paper, the proponent tries to specifically emphasise the specific influence of culture on the leadership process. In line with this, guidelines for how leaders can adapt their communication to diverse cultures are included. What is culture? Man from the start struggled to survive with nature. Everything was not learned in an instant event but humans have to undergo trial and error process. This paved way to their important experiences with nature. It is therefore implied that culture is a result of experiences from humans’ struggle for survival with nature that eventually resulted to belief, art, law, moral, customs, capabilities and habits (Ayisi, 1992). Today, these are widely observed as integral parts of everyone’s daily survival in every part of the world. Due to different and constant experiences encountered by people everyday, culture has become a system consisting of interrelated and interdependent habit pattern of response (Kroeber and Kluckhohn, 1978). Every individual has different way to respond to a certain experience. The form of response is also dependent on the available ideas and patterns of activities generated from different experiences. Culture therefore has become easy to be identified through knowing how people live, what clothes they wear, what foods they eat, what language they speak, stories they tell and celebrations they celebrate as far as knowing how they survive is concerned (Kalman, 2009). This makes culture as a way of life because it tries to define the entire being of a person. From the day an individual arrived in this planet, the entire event did not start with picking up the right thing in order. Everything had to undergo a series of events of experiences from top to bottom. This means that an individual had to struggle to come up with the right process in order to discover the right and appropriate response to every situation. Culture therefore is such a broad concept because of its connection with the human lives. It is an integral part of daily survival and without it there is no enough basis of measuring how far an individual has gone through in life. From the standpoint of cultural anthropology, culture encompasses the idea about shared concepts, values, beliefs and adaptive system (Lyman, 2008). Every nation has an idea about shared concepts, beliefs, values and adaptive system. Japanese are known for their loyalty, courtesy and other good values that are considered to be important parts of where their country right now. Their cultural values are considered integral parts of how they achieve things in life and how they face situations and circumstances. Cultural values for them are very important because this is how they should consider themselves in relation to dealing with other people not only with their own race but other people in the world. Values are very important for Japanese that even on how they achieve things with economic considerations, they considered price and quality as the most important considerations why people should go for their products. As a result, Japanese are among of the leading innovators in the world with considerable emphasis on their cutting-edge technology. The United States has certain beliefs and shared concepts about the American way of life. Part of their culture is the belief that when a certain thing is priced expensive, then it must have substantial positive impact on quality. On the other hand, the American way of life is associated with luxury from the point of view of developing and third world countries. Due to existing transnational companies in the United States, they have substantially tried to influence other countries with the western culture and the US culture in particular. For example, transnational companies such as McDonalds, KFC and Burger King were successful in their attempt to influence the taste of other countries for foods from fast food restaurants (Lozada, 2005; McLamore, 1998; Dixon, 2002). The presence of these transnational companies in every part of the world is an indication that there is substantial acceptance of the American culture from consumers in every walk of life. The United States therefore is good at creating strategic influence and this eventually is a significant result of their cultural background. Their experiences that allow them to go for high level of thinking are also enabling them to generate significant ideas that can be ground for substantial influence. There is no wonder why the United States has become one of the leading countries in the world based specifically on every detail of business environment such as politics, economic, social, legal, technological, and environmental concerns. The leadership process Leadership remains one of the most important subjects in management, academe and in every organisation. People who are having great concern on leadership continuously ask themselves the most important factors associated with effective and efficient leaders. Until today, many ideas arise from experts and studies about leadership. This is a clear indication that there is a great demand to find out the best ideas about leadership. There are different existing ideas about leadership and each of them is not hopelessly outmoded because they can be eventually used at a particular situation. Different situations require different leadership approach and different level of leadership skills. In this case, it is most important to understand existing situation in order to apply the necessary leadership approach. However, there can be no appropriate leadership approach that can be applied without full understanding on the necessary leadership styles and approach that can be applicable in every situation. One way of looking at leadership is its development over time. This means that it is by human experience one may eventually know how an appropriate leader is developed. An organisation learns by experience that there is a need for someone else to have leadership skills in order to run effectively the entire business activity. Thus, organisations continue to seek people with leadership skills in order to effectively maximise the potential of available resources and on-going operations (Northouse, 2009). Organisations try to carefully train people who are to take leadership-related responsibilities. In this way, they usually design the right leadership process. They try to expose them to considerable amount of experience. In fact, other organisations try to choose the best personnel for managerial positions with considerable amount of leadership experience and background. Organisations are looking in detail for experience when it comes to managerial positions. They cannot simply gamble the whole thing about the entire operation with personnel who do not have substantial experience for the job. This only shows that the whole thing about leadership is a process. Everything remarkably starts with experience. However, there is another way of how leadership is viewed and this is by looking at the natural traits, skills and capabilities available for an individual which can be sufficient to create substantial followers. The leadership process as illustrated by Northouse is not complete without a leader and followers. The leaders according to Northouse (2009) must be able to experience the right process and experience on becoming a leader or must necessarily posses the right trait. These are the two views about leadership and whichever way it has to be looked at, organisations always have substantial reason which view they need to implement. However, in today’s competitive world, a leader must necessarily have leadership traits which can be further enhanced through establishment of experience during the training process. This is evident in creating a transcendent leader in which the development is focused not only on self but it includes further the others and organisation. This leadership does not only focus on self-awareness and self development but also interpersonal influence and alignment of environment, strategy and organisation (Crossan et al., 2008). Formal and informal leaders undergo a process of becoming as such (Rowe and Guerrero, 2010). Managers and leaders are normally viewed as different function. However, what is common to them is the presence of power, influence and authority (Smart, 2010). Leaders are known to use them effectively. However, in order to use all of these tools in the leadership activity, leaders have to undergo process so that they will be enhanced with experiences and they can relate with the actual event in every leadership situation. According to Smart, leadership is not a static thing but it is an ongoing process and true leaders actually are continuously exposed to it on a day to day basis. Smart further added that effective leaders are those who effectively create a vision and share it to their members for its effective realisation. This clearly requires important skills to be developed. The development of a leader therefore in this case is a matter of time and experience. However, it cannot be argued that there are persons already have innate skills about leadership. This is effectively observed among charismatic leaders who have with them something that cannot be learned but has become an integral part of their entire being. However, their authority, power and influence need to be effectively used so as to enhance their leadership performance. This requires important process and the whole thing about it needs to be learned from suitable experience such as through feedbacks and iterations (Atwater et al., 2003; Ryans, 2000). The influence of culture on leadership process There are several components of leadership: it is a process, involves influencing others, it happens within a group, and it involves goal attainment and it has to be shared by leaders and followers (Rowe and Guerrero, 2010). It is therefore clear that leadership cannot stand by itself alone without a group. Leadership requires a group in order to function effectively so as to be able to achieve the required and necessary details of it. This means that culture cannot be eliminated when dealing with leadership issue considering that most leaders have to play their role in an organisation. Thus, it is important to look at leadership in the context of organisational culture. The entire leadership implementation as normally observed differs from one culture to another. For instance, Japanese are known to strongly stand for quality and technological innovation. In this case, leaders are expected to have strong influential background on total quality management and cutting-edge technology. Some culture may not entirely understand how the Japanese culture works when it comes to leadership functions in detail. However, in order to understand it the right way, there is a need to further explore how a Japanese organisational culture functions. This is very important because a manager cannot entirely perform effectively without knowing the essential culture working in a specific organisation. This is very evident in the case of IBM. The company wants to operate in other countries especially in developing countries where there is promising number of potential leaders. What the company did is conduct leadership workshop that the bottom line was to understand cultural and leadership background of each leader. IBM wants to integrate unified organisational culture for its entire operation. Its strategic move was to convey the entire vision first to its potential leaders. Its move was a form of acclimatising a potential leader to its corporate culture. The strategy was a good starting point for IBM because the vision is one of the most important components for the achievement of organisational goals. Leaders who have shared the same vision will most likely to go through the same direction. In this regard, IBM was very concerned on how its entire vision will flow from the top management down to its members. Thus, its effective approach was to understand the concept of culture and its substantial influence on the leadership process. The issue of merger for instance involves issues about corporate control, leadership and integration of organisational culture. In the case of Hewlett-Packard Company and Compaq Computer Corporation their merger was said to be a failure because of leadership, legacy and cultural issues. This claim just further proves that corporate culture is an integral part especially in two merging companies with different organisational culture. The cases of the three companies mentioned above are indications that culture is an integral part in the management aspect of an organisation. The issue of culture in the two merging companies for instance is clearly associated with leadership process as stated in the case of Hewlett-Packard Company and Compaq Computer Corporation. The entire vision of an organisation is associated with the ability of leaders to envisioned corporate culture just like in the case of IBM. In short, organisational culture indeed is an integral part of the success of an organisation which in all cases is affected by the leadership potential of designated leaders. In an organisation, communication, interpersonal relationship, and decision-making process are necessary and these are performed and achieved effectively and efficiently in line with an organisational culture (Schein, 2004). In this reason, organisational culture has become the most important consideration just prior to enhancement of the entire operation. A leader in this case needs to place more emphasis on understanding the bottom line of how each member behaves in a team. In an organisation, stereotypes, schemas, ingroup-outgroup interaction, role expectations, power and status are integral parts of the expectations of members from their leaders (Ayman and Korabik, 2010). It is in line with this that every leader needs to learn to understand the concept and approach of leadership style they have. In knowing this, leaders will be given enough ideas on what approach of leadership that suits best to a certain organisational culture. Job management and job performance can be understood further by understanding the concept of leadership and organisational cultures (Kim et al., 2011). Furthermore, there is an expected similar pattern on how leadership was affected by change, the status of society’s economic activities, diverse culture, and leadership development in general (Walker and Yu-kwong, 2010). As can be observed, leadership plays a significant role in the context of diverse culture. On the other hand, leadership style is affected by personal and national cultures (Byrne and Bradley, 2007). In addition, a work-related concern such as attitude was found to be affected by leaders’ cultural identity and varying national cultures (Testa, 2007). Leader’s communication process Communication is important in every leadership process. It requires clear and concise communication in order to share the vision, mission, and strategic goals of an organisation from one member to another. A clear communication process in this case is therefore a pre-requisite of the right implementation of strategic moves in order to achieve strategic or organisational goals. Leaders need to actually undergo communication process in order to substantially and effectively convey important details about their entire leadership activity. The whole process cannot be fully understood if at least the basic understanding about what a communication is all about is not thoroughly understood. Leaders therefore need to further enhance their basic understanding about the whole communication process. Communication as widely heard is a two-way communication process. As shown in illustration 1, the communication process has at least two important parties involved, the source and receiver. In some cases like the crowd and the speaker, there are many receivers and only one source of the message. However, in today’s competitive world, people are bombarded with different information coming from different sources. This is clear in existing marketing activities where marketers are aiming to create a need or demand for their service or product offerings. People are no longer confined with single or homogenous types of information, but there are different ideas that different sources try to effectively impart with them. This is in the hope that the message is to be effectively conveyed and so to generate results in line with organizational goals. In an organisation for instance, a Chief Executive Officer, may not just stand as manager of the group but as a leader who will spearhead the achievement of goals. There are followers that he needs to dwell with the right communication process and this is for the purpose of achieving the laid goals beforehand. As a result, there must be an important message. In an organisation, a message is usually conveyed for the purpose of giving direction heading to the right organisational goals. These messages normally are in the form of a vision and mission statements and further elaborated by expounding them into specific goals and strategies. The process of communication involves encoding of the message as to be initiated from the source down to the specified channel. After the message reached a specific channel, the entire message undergoes a decoding process to be received and understood by the receiver. In order to find out if the receiver has successfully received the message, there is a need for the source to generate feedbacks from the receiver. This proves that the entire communication is a two-way communication process. There is no other basic presentation of the entire communication process than to illustrate it as a two-way communication process. A leader therefore must be careful in processing feedback in as much as formulating the right message passing through the entire communication process. However, considering that the entire communication is a two-way process, there are considerable barriers in them (Krizan et al., 2007). These barriers are both coming from the side of the source and the receiver. In short, barriers are in any way serve as destruction for an effective communication process. Northouse noted that personality, gender-biased issue and social acceptance are some of important factors to affect leader’s communication process. In any way, these serve as barriers to the entire communication process. As can be observed, Northouse is trying to emphasise that the entire communication process is still affected by existing organisational culture. Thus, it is again important to look at leadership communication process in the context of organisational culture. Illustration 1. The Communication Process The advancement of information technology brings forward another significant change on how international corporate culture functions. Study shows that leadership styles conducted with rich communication media through videoconference and chat teams did not achieve higher task performance compared to leadership styles with no or less usage of communication media (Hambley et al., 2007). This simply tries to point out the fact that leadership communication requires more interpersonal touch considering that the entire communication process is affected by cultural aspects. Leadership communication simply has important factor regarding personal human touch. Communication is a core process that tries to build up organisational culture and towards greater productivity (Gronfeldt and Strother, 2006). Leaders therefore must learn to understand the advantage of communication as way to create organisational culture. It is therefore important for leaders to not only study culture in general but how it can be established through communication. Leaders therefore are expected to see a strong association between productivity and a rightly enhanced communication process in an organisation. Social change can be achieved through communication (Seyranian and Bligh, 2008). Great communication has become the great secret of great leaders because it increases trust, improves alignment at all levels, and create better two-way communication process for more lasting results and generally it is the key to effective leadership (Baldoni, 2003; Pauley and Pauley, 2009). Guidelines for adapting communication to diverse cultures It is therefore clear that the first move in order to create significant communication for a relatively diverse culture is to know everybody’s experience. Since culture is about tracing the root of one’s experience, formulating the appropriate communication method, process or tool will be relatively easy at some point. The case of recent earthquake, tsunami and the threat of nuclear meltdown in Japan is a good basic example. Japanese as noticed are trying to face the aftermath with their historical principle of Japanese Wa or also known as harmony, peace and balance. This principle is timely in the midst of turmoil and devastation brought about by earthquake, tsunami and aggressive effort for nuclear meltdown prevention. A leader therefore in this case is expected to deal with his comrade with sufficient amount of harmony, peace and balance in the leadership process. This can be implemented successfully by living in the principle which can only be observed from a cultural point of view. Therefore, the effect of this leadership process leads to providing communication with enough considerations on harmony, peace and balance. Based on this case, it is therefore recommended that a leader should need to focus on understanding the prevailing cultural perspective of the group so as to gain consensus amount of effort in achieving the goals. Thus, communication should be designed in a way that it can address different people at different cultural background (Wood, 2007). Since culture is about experience, then people at different walks of life have diverse beliefs about everything that is integrated with their daily survival. This means that different messages have some important implications and they may vary according to the receiver’s experience. In line with this, effective communication is necessary to be achieved. This can only be taken into consideration if leaders have sufficient background and understanding about beliefs and cultural background of the receivers of the message (Samovar et al., 2009). There are different experiences involved in the life of every person. This means that a leader needs to actually consider different point of views in looking at particular thing, issue or situation. This is a complex process to be dealt with knowing that the leadership process by itself is complicated. Handling people requires more than the required knowledge of the whole thing about it. This means that a leader needs to focus on careful understanding about the entire complex process of leadership. Furthermore, the effective leadership which requires communication with a diverse culture needs creation of effective policy and procedure. Construction of message, style and delivery are known to be associated with the ability of leaders to integrate in their leadership a charismatic approach (Hartog and Verburg, 1997). Communication in its technical format requires appropriate construction of message, style and delivery. These are some of important aspects in communication that requires enough amount of observation in order effectively convey the right information. The construction of the message, style and delivery in this case means trying to create those that will suit to certain beliefs and cultural background of the receivers. Leaders therefore should increase their interest on how people at different culture could effectively communicate (Jandt, 2001). This means that more empirical studies should be created and properly evaluated so as to come up with effective implementation of leadership process. Culture affects communication and this has to be clearly understood due to the fact that people live in different cultures, rules and self-concepts (Cushman and Cahn, 1985). In line with this, leaders should properly understand more intercultural-related concepts that will lead to successful implementation of communication process. Conclusion Cultural influence and leadership process are highly associated due to the fact that the determination of some organisations to integrate cultural understanding for the achievement of their organisational goals is highlighted in the business environment. The business environment is very complex and this means that leaders need to be highly experienced on how to address issues regarding effective leadership in the context of diverse culture. Leaders may be formal or informal, but the point is that they need to have both traits and substantial experience found in a leader. The corporate culture nowadays does not only accept the traditional view of a leader but there is always a requirement for constant exposure in the leadership process. The leadership process nowadays in a fast-changing world should be a continuous process of learning activities among leaders. In this way, leaders are expected to understand more about the concept of cultural influence in the business world. 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