How does culture impact leadership and can culture be seen as a constraint on leadership?

 How does culture impact leadership and can culture be seen as a constraint on leadership?

        Culture affects almost every aspect of leadership. Leadership behavior, objectives and strategies of organizations are affected by the values, beliefs, norms and ideals embedded in a culture. North Americans, for instance, emphasize individual capacity and effort as a foundation for promotions. Progress is attributed in India to externalities such as marriage, friends, family and corruption. Some years ago, while conducting a workshop for ninety men in Canada, I was duly informed that there would be ten men from a local native tribe at the workshop and that two of them were' elders.' Many of the workshop's leadership protocols were thrown out or significantly modified to accommodate the cultural requirement for elderly respect and an increase in overall modesty. I mastered the leadership tool known as tossing away the rule book, when conducting a workshop in Germany with a mixture of Jewish men and German men who were a decade away from the Nazi movement. The deep feelings in this cultural setting needed a noticeably non-American form of leadership to remain a step behind.

Although circumstances, belief systems, and transactional opportunities change, there is a constant call for leaders who are committed to transformative values, emotional maturity, and who have sufficient inner peace to be genuinely interested in others. The expectations are defined by usual assumptions of externally driven trade and exchange and the mechanism is then transacted. Internally motivated persons, even though the actions entail personal harm, behave according to conscience. Inner equilibrium facilitates inherent resilience vs. reactivity, cultural or otherwise to the infinitely shifting environment. Leadership development would involve teaching mental clearing/meditation practices at the individual level so that the individual could learn to experience clarity and peace of mind. Leaders must have a kind of wisdom that can flow with cultural and other environmental fluctuations beyond intellectual and transactional ability.

Reference

Women, H. G. L. C. P. (2013). Cultural constraints on the emergence of women leaders. Organizational Dynamics, 42, 191-197.

Goh, J. W. P. (2009). ‘Parallel leadership in an “unparallel” world’—cultural constraints on the transferability of Western educational leadership theories across cultures. International Journal of Leadership in Education, 12(4), 319-345.