Leadership style analysis for Poland and Japan
GLOBE findings show how cultural values and beliefs affect doing business in a certain part of the world. According to GLOBE, cultural dissimilarities, as well as different leadership styles, can be noticed even in the same country. That is why GLOBE classifies societies in 10 cultural clusters and nine cultural dimensions, by using earlier findings by Hofstede, Schwartz, Smith, Inglehart, and others.
Japan falls in the cultural cluster with a name of “Confucian Asia”. Before getting into details about the culture of this country, we would need to identify the word “Confucian” in its context. According to Human Resource Development International (2005), there are five aspects of Confucian values that include group orientation, hierarchy and harmony, guanxi (known as relationships), mianzi (that means showing respect to those who have a higher social status), and time orientation. That leads to a conclusion that key point in Japanese culture is relationships among people in the organization.
Meanwhile, Poland falls in the Eastern Europe cluster. This cluster also includes countries like Russia, Georgia, Slovenia, Greece and others. Eastern Europe is also considered a cultural crossroads because of a big variety of different cultures in it. Therefore, values and beliefs of Poland and other Eastern Europe countries differ a lot from Confucian Asia ones.
Another important step towards understanding differences and similarities between values of Japan and Poland better would be looking closely at some of their cultural dimensions. In power distance, Japan, as well as Poland, tends to be a society where authority and high social status mean a lot. That is why it is a must to have hierarchies in organizations, so Japanese and Polish people would have clearly defined roles and responsibilities. Another thing to know is that, Japan stands somewhere between being an individualistic and collectivistic society. Japanese...