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The analysis of the culture-leadership relationship is guided by two research tasks, first, testing the instrumentality of the Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness (GLOBE) methodology in cross-cultural and leadership studies, and second, shedding light on the country that was not included in the original GLOBE research, namely Bulgaria, with its distinctive culture and perceived effective leadership. Based on the surveys of 253 managers, the authors create the profile of a societal culture and the profile of organizational leadership perceived as effective in Bulgaria and compare the empirically derived results with the theoretical predictors of effective leadership in this country. They partially confirmed the hypothesis that culture is predictive of effective organizational leadership and contributed to the empirical analysis of societal behaviors and values in Bulgaria.
Keywords: organizational leadership, culture, Bulgaria, GLOBE research
INTRODUCTION
The culture and leadership phenomena have long been the target of academic inquiries. The awardwinning 62-societies Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness (GLOBE) research (House et al. 2004; Chhokar et al. 2007) connected societal cultures and leadership perceived as effective in those cultures, thus making the distinctive contribution to organizational behavior, cross-cultural studies, and international management.
Our paper is aimed to extend this scholarly inquiry and fill the gaps in exploring the relationship between culture and leadership. Hence, it is guided by two research tasks, first, testing the instrumentality of the GLOBE study in culture-leadership research and second, shedding light on the country that was not included in the original GLOBE study, namely Bulgaria, with its distinctive culture and perceived effective leadership.
We hypothesized that the GLOBE methodology which generates theoretical cultural predictors of organizational leadership and can be tested with empirical studies of Bulgarian managers. Following this methodology, we assumed that sampling from middle managers permits the generalization of the subculture of middle managers in Bulgaria; and through the combination of anthropological and psychological/behavioral traditions of culture assessment, a broader range of variables that were not often considered in cross-cultural theories increased the generalizability of these findings beyond the culture of middle managers alone towards the creation of a societal cultural profile.
This agenda explains the main three steps in our research and justifies the logic of this paper. First, we summarized the knowledge about the culture-leadership connection evidenced...