Developing Multicultural Leaders. The Journey to Leadership Success

Citation

Kallas, E. (2013), "Developing Multicultural Leaders. The Journey to Leadership Success", Cross Cultural Management: An International Journal, Vol. 20 No. 1, pp. 78-80. https://doi.org/10.1108/ccm.2013.20.1.78.1

The book is written in a format that enables pleasing both scholars and practitioners. Representing both of these groups, I was truly surprised and satisfied when completed the reading, because I found many aspects that I can apply in my managerial work and ideas that have driven me to think about possible arenas for future research. It is comprehensive, diverse and interesting reading and quite a journey, as authors of the book promise in their title.

The book explains what it takes to be a great leader by using a multicultural approach. It promises to investigate how early childhood years influence the careers of leaders, what are the specific life experiences that contribute to leadership success, how leaders with a potential become outstanding, what are the critical paths in this success journey, and finally, what great leaders do really well to become and remain outstanding. The book has it all to find answers for these questions.

The book consists of four parts and ten well organized chapters. For me the real fun started from the second part, where authors elaborate on what makes leaders outstanding, and culminated in the third part, which is about what outstanding leaders do exceptionally well. Nevertheless, foreplay starts in the first part of the book, where authors explain their conceptual views and details of the study, which is a needed reading for anticipating answers for questions of critical minds, which may arise further on. The last part of the book provides a creative spin into interpretations, future and unanswered questions.

Each chapter has its own structure that in the best way opened the topic under investigations, meaning that each chapter has its own face and character that will keep the reader anticipated and in a way thrilled. Chapters deliver theoretical background, overview on previously done studies and results of the research done by the authors of the book. The length of the chapters is smartly shaped for practicing managers, who often do not have this time and energy to read the book one at a time – each chapter is possible to overcome during implementation of job responsibilities by awarding oneself ten days with a half an hour of nurturing self‐development.

The research done by the authors brings forward results of the significant sample – 310 interviewed Middle East leaders from 12 Gulf Cooperation Council countries and Northern Arab countries. This context of the empirical study gives considerable contribution to multicultural research on leadership and thus makes the book unique. Yet, the composition of the sample does not limit the applicability of the results for larger population, even brings up new perspectives of the following investigations about how in fact different are successful leaders around the world? The book is full of quotes from interviews and interpretations of the results that grab favor especially for those who are not familiar with Middle East region culture and less so with managerial practices. It makes the book educating also from this stand.

As practicing manager, I do not have almost any doubts in the worthiness of the book, but as a scholar I would bring up some limitations from my point of view. I found that there are some well‐known theories and overviews (e.g. Hofstede's “culture as an onion”, Hall's high and low context cultures, Goleman's approach to emotional intelligence), which seem to be too descriptive and in a way too simplified for the educated reader. In addition, these overviews are not perfectly matched with and supported by research results, what raises the question about the necessity of those. The second limitation from my point of view is the overexploitation of Goleman's approaches to emotional intelligence and leadership styles – considerable amount of research conducted by the authors is based on those. Keeping from criticizing Goleman's approach, let me mention that it still remains a rather wide interpretation of how “emotions” and “intelligence” could concord, and thus reduces the suitability of underlying foundation for studying particularly emotional intelligence. If authors' aim was to evaluate emotional intelligence as such, the output would have been more precise when using, for example, Mayer, Caruso & Salovey's approach.

Nevertheless, the book consists of many challenging results of research, interesting interpretations and ideas. I found many places in the book where I marked on the margin: “That's a great thought! That's an interesting result! This is something new for me.” Herein I would outline some of those enlightenments. As an example I would point out how skillfully and exquisitely authors explain peculiarities of Middle East culture and behavior of leaders by quotes from Holy Quran whether the topic is about self‐development of leaders or decision‐making styles. For example, authors present the perception of expatriates about most admired and most disliked characteristics about them as one of the results of their study. I was somehow surprised to see that Western expatriates are perceived as those with superiority complex and arrogance, but at the same time as professional, organized, systematic, process‐oriented. As one more example I would highlight the comparison of the results of the study conducted by authors in 1980, 1989, 2003 and 2010 where they found that new generation of Middle East leaders differ significantly from the earlier groups by drifting towards more power sharing in decision making. The book definitely will give the reader a reason to make notes on a margin.

In sum, I would list again the main strengths and weaknesses of the book. The main weakness of the book is presentation of some descriptive parts about well‐known theories and approaches that are not perfectly matched with the results of the study conducted by the authors. Definite strengths are the practical applicability of the book, the research methodology that enables to extract best practices, unconventional and diverse sample of the study and interesting research results. The reader will learn about Middle East leadership practices, which is rather exceptional material for practitioners who are more familiar with the Western part of the world. After reading the book from cover to cover I could assure that buying the book will not end with having it on a bookshelf. I have intention to open some parts again and again and what is the most important I gladly share the book and knowledge obtained with my colleagues.