Communicative leadership in an intercultural context: A case study of Volvo Group. Introduction
Today, multinational corporations are looking for managers that are capable of managing a diverse workgroup and that are aware of the unique transnational business climate (Chong, 2014). However, selected managers have a tendency to not complete the international expansion due to difficulty of adapting to the new country (Jones et al., 2014). This proves the need for research on intercultural and communicative leadership skills of expatriate managers and how such knowledge may contribute to success or failure in enterprises (Stock & Potthoff, 2013). A new type of growing leadership that emerged in the late 1990’s and has been long implemented by Volvo Group, called communicative leadership, may facilitate this expatriate issue by promoting effective …show more content…
This means that the managers should be able to mediate the common perspectives in a flexible way while stimulating the variability in activities that suits the local environment. While using the CLI, Volvo took a deliberate decision to define the term “communicative leadership” quite subjective in order to take in the cultural differences (Nordblom & Hamrefors, 2013). The diverse answers from the measurement was used to interpret cultural contexts (Nordblom & Hamrefors, 2013). At the same time, the definitions provided by Volvo of communicative leadership was based on the company’s overall principle of good leadership, which created some form of uniformity that goes beyond cultural differences (Nordblom & Hamrefors, 2013). Volvo emphasized that managers must show respect, resolve conflicts, let employees gain influence on the work situation, give feedback and keep the employees well informed (Johansson et al.,
Today, multinational corporations are looking for managers that are capable of managing a diverse workgroup and that are aware of the unique transnational business climate (Chong, 2014). However, selected managers have a tendency to not complete the international expansion due to difficulty of adapting to the new country (Jones et al., 2014). This proves the need for research on intercultural and communicative leadership skills of expatriate managers and how such knowledge may contribute to success or failure in enterprises (Stock & Potthoff, 2013). A new type of growing leadership that emerged in the late 1990’s and has been long implemented by Volvo Group, called communicative leadership, may facilitate this expatriate issue by promoting effective …show more content…
This means that the managers should be able to mediate the common perspectives in a flexible way while stimulating the variability in activities that suits the local environment. While using the CLI, Volvo took a deliberate decision to define the term “communicative leadership” quite subjective in order to take in the cultural differences (Nordblom & Hamrefors, 2013). The diverse answers from the measurement was used to interpret cultural contexts (Nordblom & Hamrefors, 2013). At the same time, the definitions provided by Volvo of communicative leadership was based on the company’s overall principle of good leadership, which created some form of uniformity that goes beyond cultural differences (Nordblom & Hamrefors, 2013). Volvo emphasized that managers must show respect, resolve conflicts, let employees gain influence on the work situation, give feedback and keep the employees well informed (Johansson et al.,