National Culture as a Moderator of the Relationship Between Managers’ Use of Guidance Sources and How Well Work Events Are Handled

Abstract

Managerial leadership within 56 nations is examined in terms of the sources of guidance that managers use to handle work events. Correlations between the sources of guidance that managers use and the perceived effectiveness of how well these events are handled are employed to represent their schemas and attributional propensities for effectiveness. These correlations are predicted to vary in relation to dimensions of national culture. The hypotheses are tested using data from 7,701 managers. Reliance on one’s own experience and training, on formal rules and procedures, and on one’s subordinates are positively correlated with perceived effectiveness globally, whereas reliance on superiors, colleagues, and unwritten rules are negatively correlated with perceived effectiveness. Cross-level analyses revealed support for hypotheses specifying the ways in which each of these correlations is moderated by one or more of the dimensions of national culture first identified by Hofstede (1980). These results provide an advance on prior analyses that have tested only for main effect relationships between managerial leadership and national culture.