Context and Power Distance

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Two additional leadership factors are context and power distance. For example, you may recall that people from high-context cultures (such as Japan) tend to communicate in indirect ways, whereas those from low-context cultures (like the United States) communicate more directly (Hall, 1976). Imagine, for example, a manager tasked with keeping a team on target to meet a very tight deadline. A leader from a high-context culture might simply present a calendar noting due dates and filled with tasks and competing projects; she would rely on her team to get the point that the deadline is in trouble and expect team members to offer solutions. A leader from a low-context culture, on the other hand, would be more likely to clarify the situation directly: “I’m moving the deadline earlier by two weeks; that means you’ll need to accelerate your work accordingly.” The ways in which group members respond will also be influenced by culture: group members from a high-context culture might communicate in a similarly indirect way with their leader (“We have some concerns about the new deadline”), while those from a low-context culture would be more direct (“Sorry, we can’t make the new deadline”).

In addition to high- and low-context cultures, power distance is a cultural difference that affects how groups communicate. As we learned in chapter 3, power distance is the extent to which less powerful members of a group, be it a business organization or a family, accept that power is distributed unequally. This means that a person who is leading a group in a high power distance culture and wants all members to offer their ideas in a meeting might need to make a special effort to encourage everyone to participate in the discussion, whereas in a group with low power distance, members are likely to offer their opinions without much prodding.