Final report Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Final report - Essay Example ?Southern Asia’ and ‘Confucian Asia’ concluded that an integral component of leadership which is known as participative leadership varies in its presence across the three clusters, where the Western or Anglo culture observably places greater value upon participation to assist leadership in comparison with both of the remaining groups comprising of Asian countries. Swierczek (1991) however, negates this notion as per his research findings based on a sample of exclusively Asian managers who appreciate and favor participation over direction as leadership behaviors. Adler (1991) suggested that leadership models developed in the West and particularly in the United States have failed to address cross-cultural leadership dilemmas which has greatly diminished their applicability on a universal scale, this brings us to the perspective presented by Bass (1990) who claimed that commentators and researches must learn to identify the distinction between leadership models that are specific to the dimensions of a culture compared to those that can be applied on a global scale. This suggests that the specificity of Western models of leadership is not an indicator of their effectiveness or ineffectiveness but a measure of their applicability. Dorfman et al. (1997 pp.233-234) concluded that despite of the common belief that the universality of leadership models and behaviors is very weak or in some cases non-existent, three distinct leadership behaviors; contingent reward, supportive and charismatic displayed their subsistence on a global scale, while, participative, contingent punishment and directive approaches to leadership were found to exist only in particular cultures. Similarly, the cultural specificity of participative leadership behavior was also found by Ashkanasay (2002) while, the findings of Bass & Avolio, 1993) also reported that the application of leadership models on a cross-cultural basis is a possibility. Mills (2005) adopts a neutral stance in his analysis of Asian and Western leadership models, acknowledging that while both approaches are fairly distinctive from each other they also carry a certain extent of resemblance. In understanding why certain aspects of Asian leadership models are so dramatically different from their Western counterparts, Mills (2005) asserts that in an Asian business setting family and political associations are more prevalent than in Western organizations, Chu (2011) notes that a majority of large corporations in Asia are in fact family business. Moreover, it is also speculated whether culture actually is the principle factor in assessing the difference between Asian and Western leadership models or is it the varying economic, corporate and social development stages of the organizations existing in the two regions (Mills, 2005). Mills (2005) argues that from a Western point of view, CEOs of organizations operating in countries