Lideres Orientales Y Occidentales

Western and Eastern Leadership

Introduction

During the history, they have been many leaders from different cultures that have influenced in a huge way in hundred and sometimes thousand or million people; and their words, values and behaviors remain until these days. All the leaders have some characteristics and skills in common but also, the values that the followers admired in them, depend on the culture of the leader, if he belongs to a western or and eastern culture.

First of all we should ask ourselves:

What is leadership and who is a leader?

Leadership has been described by Chemers M. as "a process of social influence in which one person can enlist the aid and support of others in the accomplishment of a common task”. (SOURCE: ^ Chemers M. (1997) An integrative theory of leadership. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers. ISBN 978-0-8058-2679-1). By the other hand, a leader is known simply as somebody whom people follow, and has the ability of transforming their attitudes, beliefs and behaviors. “Thus, followers reveal a high level of trust in such leaders and emulate their behavior, assume their values, and are committed to achieving their vision and making sacrifices in this regard.” (Bass, 1990; Jung and Avolio, 2000).

So now that we know what a leader is and how he can influents in people to become his loyal followers, we will describe important leaders from eastern and western societies with the reasons of why they were so famous in their own cultures and then make a comparison between the values and behaviors of each other.

Leader from an eastern culture

Despite of the globalization and the cross cultural encounters, the eastern society, in general terms, have own values and ideals which are different from a western culture. According to these, the characteristics and values what people admire in a leader should be different between the diverse cultures. Every culture have a special type of leader, but the reason of why we are going to talk about the values before the leader, is because values play a central and important role in the human behavior. They shape norms, symbols, practices and even heroes or leaders at the core of culture, influencing not only attitudes and perceptions, but also choices. “Values are internalized over a lifetime as individuals are socialized from a young age within the context of a (national) culture, learning and adopting dominant values”. (Hattrup et al. 2007) SOURCE: http://siteresources.worldbank.org/ECAEXT/Resources/258598-1284061150155/7383639-1323888814015/031412_03.pdf

To analyze the eastern values, we will focus on China, a huge country with

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