Cultural Dimensions And Leadership Styles

Discuss about the Cultural dimensions and leadership styles, the Case of South Korea and Egypt.

 

 

On cultural dimensions, the issue of masculinity ad femininity is of concern across the middle east and Asia countries represented by Egypt and South Korea respectively. The business functions that these cultures portray are of great difference. Like many Middle East countries, Egypt has presented its culture to obstruct feminine gender into business ventures.  Middle East is a Muslim world. The constrictive stereotype existing in this country affects negotiations in businesses (Bird and Mendenhall, 2016, p.107).

In contrast, south Korea is a bit different from Egypt. The cultural dimension of gender disparity is at balance. Women and men are more equally represented in business endeavors with men. The score is at around 102^nd, that is, 0.965 (Stewart and Cho, 2016, p. 96).

This makes the case of South Korea different from that of Egypt. Beside this factor, there is the religious ideology factor. There exists a Muslim dominance in Egypt and other Middle East states. For this factor, many people including in business are made to succumb to the religious believes as per the Islamic principles. The power in business has therefore been curtailed by the issue of religion. Women are not empowered in Middle East states like it is for the Asian countries where Christianity has taken its roots together with Buddhism to empower women (James-Hawkins, Qutteina and Yount, 2017, p. 168).

According to Hofstede, the issue of Individualism and collectivism in the society is an aspect of cultural dimension. Both in South Korea and Egypt, the business people engages themselves in bargaining differently. To start with, there is more cohesion in Egypt as people are geared towards collectivism in business. The concept of “I” and “we” can be attributed to this aspect.

The 7 trompenaar’s dimensions of culture that is, universalism vs particularism, individualism vs communitarianism, neutral vs emotional, specific vs diffuse, achievement vs ascription, sequential vs synchronic and internal vs external, all can be used to understand the dimensions of culture in Egypt as compared to South Korea as well (Minkov and Hofstede, 2014, p.161).

The culture of business in the two countries is also different. The Middle East Egypt has been noted with high drives to business ventures. In South Korea, the economy is slightly lower than it is in Egypt. In the Agriculture and trade, Egypt is at a higher position than South Korea. The culture of business and trade has been embraced so much in Egypt. While men in Middle East are more concerned in activities of trade, women are in household development (Gelfand, et al., 2017, p.514).

Power distance index is a major dimension of culture. People expect the sharing of power in any institution of business, administration and also political authorities to be equally distributed. There is 4stablishment of hierarchy which traverses from the high authority to the lower authority. People will at most cases question the proceedings of the authority and express their needs of sharing power.

The leadership style in these countries is almost the same. In political leadership, Moon Jae in is the acting president in South Korea who succeeded Park Geunhye. Egypt president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi also is the acting president of the republic of Egypt. South Korea is however different for it has a very democratic government. For instance, it managed to impeach Park Geun who did not how up the expected standards of leadership. Egypt has for some time shown some degree of unfairness in elections and election of presidents. The acting president for instance was said to win the election s with over 90% of the votes while the turn up was below 50%. This was due to the high rate of injustice and fairness on the election processes.

In business and management levels in the two countries, Egypt has shown a level of autocratic leadership. In many Egyptian organizations, both private and government institutions, autocratic leadership prevails. In contrast, there is evident cross cultural leadership in South Korea. Ruling people in different capacities are centered from different cultural groups but in Egypt, the representation of the working class is regional (French, 2015, p.292).

References

Bird, A. and Mendenhall, M.E., 2016. From cross-cultural management to global leadership: Evolution and adaptation. Journal of World Business, 51(1), pp.115-126.

French, R., 2015. Cross-cultural management in work organisations. Kogan Page Publishers.

Gelfand, M.J., Aycan, Z., Erez, M. and Leung, K., 2017. Cross-cultural industrial organizational psychology and organizational behavior: A hundred-year journey. Journal of Applied Psychology, 102(3), p.514.

James-Hawkins, L., Qutteina, Y. and Yount, K.M., 2017. The patriarchal bargain in a context of rapid changes to normative gender roles: Young Arab women’s role conflict in Qatar. Sex Roles, 77(3-4), pp.155-168.

Minkov, M. and Hofstede, G., 2014. A replication of Hofstede’s uncertainty avoidance dimension across nationally representative samples from Europe. International Journal of Cross Cultural Management, 14(2), pp.161-171.

Moran, R.T., Abramson, N.R. and Moran, S.V., 2014. Managing cultural differences. Routledge.

Stewart, J.A. and Cho, Y., 2016. Action learning to develop inclusive leadership capability: lessons from South Korea and the UK.