Situational leadership in cross-cultural environments: The relationship between cross-cultural experience, culture training, leadership style, and leader-effectiveness in the United States foreign service

This study extends Situational Leadership Theory (SLT) to cross-cultural environments to investigate factors such as cross-cultural experience and training that may effect a leader's choice of leadership style appropriate to the host country culture. The effective leader, according to SLT, will adopt a leadership style appropriate for a given task after evaluating the situational variables, including the characteristics of the subordinates. Culture is possibly the most important situational variable effecting the leader/follower relationship in cross-cultural environments. However, despite the growing importance of international management in the global economy, few empirical studies have tested SLT in cross-cultural environments or investigated factors that help an expatriate manager evaluate the local situation.; The research was conducted in two related parts. The first part used SLT to test the relationship between leadership style—Consideration and Initiating Structure—and employee satisfaction with supervision. The second part focused on those leaders who exhibited an appropriate leadership style to determine the relationship between cross-cultural experience and culture training and choice of that leadership style.; The survey sample comprised 128 host country nationals in 19 countries where work-related values differed significantly from that of the United States according to Hofstede's cultural dimensions. The Leader Behavior Description Questionnaire and the Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire were the survey instruments used in this study.; The study found that within the survey sample, high Consideration was the preferred leadership style in all categories and countries studied and may transcend cultural differences. Initiating Structure, however, was variable. High Structure was preferred leadership style except for nonprofessional and Japanese employees. The relationship between Cross-cultural experience, Consideration, Initiating Structure and employee satisfaction with supervision was not statistically significant. A larger percentage of supervisors in the sample population who exhibited the perceived high-high leadership style had culture training than those without training. However, the relationship between supervisors who had culture training and those who did not and choice of effective leadership style was not statistically significant.