Leadership in Indian Organizations from a Comparative Perspective

This study explores the "culturalist" thesis in "hybrid" firms in India. The term hybrid refers to companies that represent (through business education or business association) a mixture of traditional Indian and Western practices. Such firms currently dominate the Indian industrial economy. The objective of this study was to identify some of the dimensions on which the top leadership of hybrid Indian business organizations differs from Western business organizations. To identify differences, the study used the Leadership Practices Inventory (LPI) that gives feedback on five leadership practices (challenging, inspiring, enabling, modeling and encouraging) as reported by the leaders and their subordinates. The study found that the Indian CEOs rated and were rated higher than their US counterparts on four dimensions of the LPI (challenging, modeling, inspiring, enabling) and lower on encouraging. It was argued that this higher rating of the CEO in Indian organizations is probably due to an idealization of leaders in the Indian cultural context. Whereas this idealization leads to a greater degree of commitment and satisfaction among the senior managers, it also has the consequence that the leader is deprived of that critical feedback which would help him or her develop more effective leadership practices.