The Development and Validation of the Cultural Leadership Scale

Abstract

Most studies of organizational culture acknowledge the importance of leadership, but few explain how exactly leaders influence culture. In this paper, we seek to fill this gap by identifying the essence of cultural leadership and establishing a measure for the construct. Using data collected from different sources in multiple waves over three consecutive studies, we inductively examined the behaviors of cultural leadership and validated the newly-established instrument called the cultural leadership scale (CLS), using hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) analyses. The results suggested that cultural leadership makes unique contribution beyond transformational leadership in explaining followers internalization of corporate values, person-organization value congruence, perceived meaning of work, organizational identification, promotive and prohibitive voice behaviors. We conclude with a summary of implications for theories and practice as well as suggestions for future research.