Global environment and rapidly new technology development made company has network with people from different various background of education and culture. Thus, it will lead them to have chance to know other culture especially in multinational company where most of the employee comes from various culture. Apparently, diversity in company culture becomes issue because of the different location of headquarters with its subsidiaries in other country. Communication, managing culture and team would be an important factor for the growth of company. Indeed, the company need leader as someone who have inner ability, well manner behavior and understanding culture for managing team which is called “team leadership”.
Culture is defined as the learned beliefs, values, rules, norms, symbols, and traditions that are common to a group of people (Northouse, P.G, 2007). The concept of culture, multicultural or diversity strongly related with leadership because it has impact on how leaders influence others. The term of individualistic vs collectivistic, egalitarian-hierarchical vs task orientation, and Hofstede theory (power distance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism-collectivism, masculinity - feminity, and long term – short term orientation) would be familiar approach that many researcher do.
Why do leader need know the culture? As global leaders they need communicate effectively across culture and geographic boundaries. In order to do that, they need to know characterize of its employee that comes from different countries, while GLOBE researchers analyze the similarities and differences between cultural groups (62 countries). For instance, I would like to mention of Nordic Europe (Denmark, Finland, and Sweden) and the analysis are high on future orientation, gender egalitarianism, institutional collectivism, uncertainty avoidance, low on assertiveness, in-group collectivism, and success. However, in Confucian Asia have different character are high in performance orientation, in group collectivism, and loyal to families. Both of culture would be cause complexity in managing team if people try to find differences between them. The important thing for managing team is leader’s behavior necessary meet with group’s need and matches the complexity of the situation. In addition, a leader needs to set up “objective or goal” that can accept by others in effective and efficient way.
How to achieve team effective in diversity culture? Some researcher (Hill’s) have model that would be help leader to achieve “team effectiveness”. According to this model, leader need to monitor internal and external condition before making decision because it impact of their action which are internal action (task and relational, for instance: planning, controlling, managing conflict) and external action (environment, such as networking). This concept would not be succeeding if the leader has not appropriate well manner behavior. There are some of characteristic that facilitate outstanding leadership such as trustworthy, positive, motivational , encouraging, charismatic that relates with trait approach. I could say some of leader such as Gandhi, Nelson Mandela as a leader who has high integrity. According to some researcher, leadership behavior is seen as team-based problem solving in which the leader attempts to achieve team goals by analyzing the internal and external situation and then selecting and implementing the appropriate behaviors to ensure team effectiveness (Fleishman,et al,1991).
Different culture would impact on different behavior as well as leadership behavior. There are many seminar, training about diversity culture and leadership that very popular now days. As I mention before leadership skills is not magic, and it’s not that someone people’s have and others don’t. Thus, the difference is a good leader would be adapting with complexity situation because they understand their own culture biases and he or she can communicate across cultural in proper way.
Finally, performance of team not only depends on the performance of team leader, but also team member that consists of people from different background and culture that have ability to do the job and has positive of personal style will be boost performance of team. Whenever he or she as a team leader can act align with the objective of team and capable to manage the team member, that’s the core of team leadership.
References
Northouse, P.G. (2007), Leadership Theory and Practice, 4th edition, Sage Publication.
No comments:
Post a Comment