The role of leader's gender and national culture in assessing the perceived leadership effectiveness of male and female leaders.

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Despite the increasing understanding of the leadership practices across cultures and the role that gender plays in the perceptions of leadership effectiveness, the research investigating the differences in leader's effectiveness perceptions within a corporate cross-cultural context remains limited (Lin, Chen & Song, 2012; Lee & Sukoco, 2010). In addition, the topic of the gendered expectations of the leadership behaviour as displayed by the followers, remains under-researched and there is still insufficient understanding of the impacts of the national culture on the leadership style, especially in the context of gender (Snaebjornsson et al, 2015; Snaebjornsson & Edvardsson, 2013). Considering that the vast majority of the existing leadership research is predominantly based on North American and Wester European samples, and in the view of limited number of culturally comparative research on gender and leadership (Snaebjornsson & Edvardsson, 2013; Snaebjornsson et al. 2015), this research aims to address these gaps in cross-national leadership gender studies in support of more culturally-sensitive and gender-inclusive leadership frameworks. The proposed research aims to investigate the extent to which the leaders managing teams that are culturally more similar to their own will be perceived as more successful than those leading in a culturally different context and how pronounced the discrepancies between the leadership effectiveness ratings of the latter group will be for the female leaders than they are for males, due to the implicit expectations of leadership derived from one's national culture. The methodology will include a convenience sample of 80 leaders from the United Kingdom, Netherlands, India and Japan working within large multinational organisations. The choice of countries was motivated by the access to participants, as well as their differences on the Power Distance, Uncertainty Avoidance, Individualism/Collectivism and Masculinity/Femininity dimensions of the Hofstede's (1980, 2001) model. To allow for the between-group comparisons, half of the participants will be managing teams within the same cultural domain (e.g. Indian manager with an Indian team), while the other half will be working with teams from a different culture (e.g. British manager with an Indian team). To obtain the ratings of the leadership expectations, participants and their teams will be asked to complete leadership questionnaire of the GLOBE study (Hanges & Dickson, 2004) used in combination with the national culture scores according to the index scores listed in Hofstede et al. (2010). In addition, respondents will be asked to complete a leadership effectiveness 360-degree questionnaire, allowing the comparison of the self and others' ratings on the leadership effectiveness for male and female leaders.