Are leadership styles influenced by national cultures?
If one defines styles as some of the more very specific ways in which people act—how they dress, structure some aspects of their days, have lunch—those areas are clearly influenced by national culture. If a leader simply ignores them, if you drop a Canadian into India, for example, and she acts exactly as she does in Canada, you can have difficulties. The Canadian style could get in the way of that person’s actually helping others to create the right vision, getting people to work together to create the right strategy, etc. So the answer to your question is ‘yes’, national culture is important. But there are those who believe that leadership is entirely dependent on the local culture and that is not true. From all the work I have done the evidence is overwhelming on this point. For years now I have been dealing with executives in our senior executive program at Harvard who come from dozens and dozens of countries, a program which now has about 320 people in it every year. Seventy perce
