National Culture and Leadership Style in a Multicultural Environment: The Luxembourg Case

Hofstede’s research on cultural differences and its implication for management style has been reviewed and acknowledged for decades. His findings suggest cultural dimensions have strong impact on expected behavior of supervisors and subordinates. The GLOBE survey identified leadership styles that work in any cultural environment. There is a strong indicator that in addi-tion to cultural specific leadership styles there is also a universal one. The leadership categories identified by GLOBE as universally effective, were very similar to the dimensions of transforma-tional leadership. This paper analyzes nationality as a predictor of Transformational Leadership style with a sample of 250 managers from Luxembourg; an EU country with a highly interna-tional workforce comprised of 69.5% foreigners. The results based on regression show, that there is no prediction of national culture regarding preferred leadership style. This finding is of high implication for a multicultural business environment as it is in Luxembourg. This research sug-gests a diminishing influence of national culture in such a multicultural business environment