“The perception of leadership among Swedish and Indonesian business students”

A common question that leadership students are facing today concerns the nature of leadership itself. House et al. (2004) call leadership as an enigma-a puzzle within a puzzle since there is no comprehensive definition that encompasses all divergent views about leadership. Researchers like Jackson & Perry (2008) argue that leadership is predominantly an American construct due to the fact that most of the leadership books are written and published by Americans. As Gerstner & Day (1994) argue, our perception of leadership is very much influenced by our self-reflection and our culture, which also means that American researchers and authors will use their self-reflection based on the values, symbols and language (culture) of their own. The definition of leadership could vary depending on who you ask and what culture/nationalities people belong to. In fact the concept of leadership itself is not something fixed and unchangeable; it changes from time to time. Obviously people could have different perceptions of leadership after some life experiences or education. This thesis will study how students from two different nationalities (Swedish and Indonesian) perceive leadership. They may use some guidance from the text books that they have learned, give example(s) of the leader(s) that they admire or just simply share their work life experience regarding leadership since some of the students work/has worked in a company. The goal of this thesis is twofold: to find out if business students from these two very different cultures think differently about the very concept of leadership, and to find out if they think differently about what constitutes good leadership. If the way we think about business leadership is indeed essentially an American phenomenon, that has conquered the world, one would not expect many differences. But perhaps leadership is a phenomenon that is experienced very differently in different cultures, in which case one would expect differences between Indonesian and Swedish business students