The impact of culture and gender on leadership behavior: Higher education and management

The study of culture, gender and leadership behavior has received much interest from researchers during the last three decades. This paper attempts to propose a conceptual framework consisting three human resource management (HRM) practices (culture, gender and leadership styles) and to explain the relationship among these variables. Culture plays an important role to adopt different leadership styles because it influences the way in which individuals, groups and teams interact with each other and cooperate to achieve organizational goals. The seven cultural elements are measured in the current study i.e., i) member identity ii) rewards criteria iii) team emphasis iv) means-end orientation v) control vi) unit integration and vii) risk/ conflict tolerance. Results show that the culture has a significant influence on male leaders to adopt different leadership styles, but female leaders likely participative in their leadership positions and try to adopt democratic leadership in different cultures.