Interpersonal leadership across cultures: a historical exposé and a research agenda

Abstract

Culture has a profound impact on interpersonal leadership, which refers to an everyday type of leadership involving leader interaction with subordinates. Typical interpersonal leadership actions include empowering, providing support and development, directing, following-up and giving feedback, as well as communicating and encouraging collaboration in teamwork. In early comparative leadership studies, variation in leadership behavior across countries was assumed to be due to cultural differences. This assumption was later empirically supported by cross-cultural leadership research. As leadership behaviors in multi-country studies did not demonstrate similar associative patterns regarding interpersonal leadership in different countries, the use of mainstream single-country derived leadership meta-categories was invalidated. New reliable, robust and culturally endorsed interpersonal leadership dimensions were developed and measured in large-scale, multi-country studies. These emerged from different perspectives: that of leader-centeredness measuring ideal leadership prototypes, and that of employee-centeredness, where subordinate preferences for interpersonal leadership are essential to granting the leader the “License to Lead.” Deliberations on fundamental issues in studying interpersonal leadership across national borders in combination with contemporary trends, such as distance leadership, global virtual teams and intersectionality, led to the formulation of research implications and a research agenda for a better understanding of interpersonal leadership in the future.