Relationships between Leadership Styles and Prosocial Motivation Depend on Cultural Values: A Case Study in Sri Lanka

Vathsala Wickramasinghe () and D.G. Gardner
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Vathsala Wickramasinghe: University of Moratuwa
D.G. Gardner: University of Colorado [Colorado Springs]

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Abstract: Organizations are increasingly concerned about their social and environmental responsibilities and are interested in developing strategies to improve their performance and accountability in these areas. One such strategy focuses on leadership styles, by which leaders are selected or trained to address the needs of people and entities outside themselves (i.e., stakeholders), and subsequently inspire their followers to do the same. Implicit in this strategy is an assumption that a new type of leadership is required to achieve social and environmental responsibility goals. In this study, we offer a different perspective by proposing that leaders may only need to be encouraged or trained to emphasize some aspects of their existing leadership styles, while minimizing the use of others. We focus our study in Asia, where a paternal leadership style is prevalent, and often expected by followers. This leadership style consists of behaviors that may be organized into three dimensions: authoritarian, benevolent, and moral. We propose that the benevolent and moral dimensions reflect leadership styles that promote followers' social motivation and examine their interaction with the self-transcendent values of their followers in predicting followers' prosocial motivation to help others through their work. We found that only the benevolent dimension was significant and appeared to compensate for low self-transcendent values in followers. Implications for using leadership to promote social responsibility are discussed.

Keywords: Cultural context; Prosocial behavior; Employee motivation; Cross-cultural leadership; corporate social responsibility; prosocial motivation; self-transcendent values; personal values; paternal leadership style; leadership (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-05548408v1
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Published in Merits , 2023, 3, pp.445-458. ⟨10.3390/merits3030026⟩

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05548408

DOI: 10.3390/merits3030026

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