Cultural congruence vs cultural authenticity: which predicts international leader effectiveness?

The ‘cultural congruence proposition’ has long been accepted as a credo amongst cultural theorists and researchers (Dorfman & House, 2004). According to the proposition leader behaviour which is aligned with collective cultural values will engender more positive ratings of effectiveness than behaviour which conflicts with cultural values. Hence leaders from one culture encountering others from a different culture should modify their behaviour towards the collective values of the others in order to enhance their effectiveness (Dorfman, Hanges & Brodbeck, 2004). Recent research suggests that individual leaders’ effectiveness is engendered by behaviour which is ‘authentic’ or consistent with their own personal values (Avolio & Gardner, 2005). By drawing together the streams of cultural congruence and authentic leadership theories we developed a new proposition which asserts that leaders who are culturally authentic, or who behave consistently with their own cultural values, will be considered as more effective than leaders who do not behave consistently with their own cultural values. To the best of our knowledge this ‘cultural authenticity’ proposition has not been published or tested previously. Our purpose in this study was to test the two propositions amongst employees in an international commercial enterprise.