Paternalistic Leadership in Workplace? A Cross-Cultural Review for Future Research

Abstract

Researchers have always proposed leadership as an important concept in management and as a significant tool for developing positive employees’ behaviors. And paternalistic leaders may demonstrate authoritarianism, benevolence, and morality in their actions that may positively affect the entire organization. With its traits and management style, this sort of leader has the ability and authority to influence people, empower them, and make them loyal to their organization, thus enhancing the organization's performance. This study determines the role of PL on organization level and discuss what impact it brings on employees’ behaviors. Moreover this study also studies the impact of PL across different cultures. The study examines the leadership style in context of Asian and Western societies and found that most of the Asian countries exhibits paternalistic leadership styles in their organizations which in turn increases their performance as well as increases the overall satisfaction of their workers. Whereas, the western culture is reluctant to use paternalistic leadership in their working environment and tend to use other leadership styles such as democratic or autocratic. This difference of the styles is due to the cultural differences in both the parts of the world. So, we can state that culture greatly influences the leadership style in workplaces and managers need to understand which style is most suitable for their culture as well as for the workplace to get better results.