Cross-Cultural Variation in Political Leadership Styles.

Petia Paramova,Herbert Blumberg

doi:10.5964/ejop.v13i4.1412

Petia Paramova, Herbert Blumberg

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.5964/ejop.v13i4.1412

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Abstract

Guided by gaps in the literature with regard to the study of politicians the aim of the research is to explore cross-cultural differences in political leaders’ style. It compares the MLQ (Avolio & Bass, 2004) scores of elected political leaders (N = 140) in Bulgaria and the UK. The statistical exploration of the data relied on multivariate analyses of covariance. The findings of comparisons across the two groups reveal that compared to British political leaders, Bulgarian leaders were more likely to frequently use both transactional and passive/avoidant behaviours. The study tests Bass’s (1997) strong assertion about the universality of transformational leadership. It contributes to the leadership literature by providing directly measured data relating to the behaviours of political leaders. Such information on the characteristics of politicians could allow for more directional hypotheses in subsequent research, exploring the contextual influences within transformational leadership theory. The outcomes might also aid applied fields. Knowledge gained of culturally different leaders could be welcomed by multicultural political and economic unions, wherein understanding and allowances might aid communication.

Highlights

Guided by gaps in the literature with regard to the study of politicians the aim of the research is to explore cross-cultural differences in political leaders’ style
MANCOVA addresses the issue of covariate effects, often leading to an increase in withingroup error. Aspects such as gender (Eagly, Johannesen-Schmidt, & van Engen, 2003; Eagly & Johnson, 1990) and age (Kobacoff & Stoffey, 2001; Oshagbemi, 2008) have been previously shown to affect the frequency of leadership behaviours displayed by leaders; since these aspects were measured here, controlling for their effects helped when inferences about group variation were drawn
The higher instances of passive/avoidant behaviours in Bulgarian leaders is an interesting and noteworthy finding, which tentatively answers the question posed in the introduction

Summary

Introduction

Guided by gaps in the literature with regard to the study of politicians the aim of the research is to explore cross-cultural differences in political leaders’ style It compares the MLQ (Avolio & Bass, 2004) scores of elected political leaders (N = 140) in Bulgaria and the UK. The study tests Bass’s (1997) strong assertion about the universality of transformational leadership It contributes to the leadership literature by providing directly measured data relating to the behaviours of political leaders. Such information on the characteristics of politicians could allow for more directional hypotheses in subsequent research, exploring the contextual influences within transformational leadership theory. In this model the ‘passive/avoidant’ style signified a ‘negative’ leadership style, which was used as a baseline anchor point (Avolio, 1999)

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