Leaders don’t all walk and talk the same. Staying true to one’s culture is integral to empowered leadership.
Li Huang vividly recalls her first impression of a particular junior-high-school English teacher in her native city of Xi’an, China.
On the first day of class, Li recalls, the foreign-born teacher sat down and put his feet up on his desk. In talking with the teacher months later, she found out that, although his action had been an obvious Westerners’ faux pas in the eyes of his Asian students, he “felt a great sense of authority when he was striking that pose.”
Now an assistant professor of organisational behaviour at the international business school Insead, Li says that how we carry ourselves not only shapes our standing in the eyes of others, but also can affect whether we feel in control in many life situations.
Researchers suggest that the link between physicality and feelings of power has an evolutionary component, citing the expansive postures associated with dominance among several species in the animal kingdom. For Li, however, culture plays a critical yet often overlooked role.
As leadership researchers and practitioners have come to realise in the past few decades, physical gestures meant to convey leadership in one cultural context can undermine one’s authority in another. For example, Li’s English teacher later discovered, to his dismay and surprise, that, instead of thinking he was very teacher-like, Li and her classmates thought, “‘He’s such a big kid,' acting in a very rude and haphazard way,” she says.
More important, as the body language of leadership sometimes sends drastically different messages to audiences with different cultural upbringings, so body postures do not always shape leaders’ thoughts and actions in a universal way. An Asian striking a feet-on-the-desk pose would not only appear overly casual, even arrogant, to other Asians, but might also fail to draw from the posture the same sense of power that the foreign teacher did. In other words, if leaders aren’t careful, not only may their attempts to cut a commanding figure get lost in translation, they may actually make themselves feel less powerful.
Li’s research into this topic is recounted in “Stand Tall, but Don’t Put Your Feet Up,” a paper she co-wrote with Adam Galinsky, Lora Park and Lindsey Streamer for the current issue of The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
Li and her collaborators conducted a series of studies in which participants of Western and Asian descent were instructed to hold a range of postures that “were being pilot-tested for a separate study,” and immediately afterward underwent tests designed to measure how powerful they felt and how inclined they were to take decisive action. As Li expected, both Westerners and Asians experienced a greater sense of power after striking most of the more expansive poses than after adopting a more constrictive attitude.
However, the two cultures parted ways on perhaps the most expansive pose of all: leaning back in a chair with both feet propped up on a desk, as Li’s English teacher had done. For Westerners the extremely casual but dominant pose appeared to serve as a confidence booster, sending power indicators shooting up. For Asians it had the opposite effect, leaving them feeling less powerful even than the constrictive posture.
Li and her colleagues attribute these results to a divergence in Western and Asian cultural norms.
“In Western cultures the self is construed as independent, unique and separate from others,” the authors write. “In contrast, East Asian philosophies such as Confucianism and Buddhism conceptualise the self as inherently interconnected and interdependent with others.”
This fundamental distinction means that leaders from the two cultures are likely to conduct themselves differently in certain situations. It also means that the same posture may lead to different neural-endocrine responses, feelings, cognition and behaviour in leaders from the two cultures.
Indeed, when self-assertion appears to cross over into arrogance, Asians see it as a violation of their cultural norms of self-restraint, and their sense of power withers as a result.
All the experiments for the paper were conducted in the United States, Li adds.
“Even though (the participants) were in a Western context,” she says, “the cultural values that they were raised on were still very much an integral part of their cognitive structure.”
This suggests that, even among multi-culturals, the norms of one’s original culture inform ideas about what constitutes “proper” conduct for leaders, and to act against these values by adopting certain body postures can create negative feelings and actions.
Why do feelings of power matter? Do they affect work performance as well as perception?
“Another very important cognitive consequence of the psychological experience of power is the ability to see the big picture, seeing the forest for the trees,” Li says. “Since we find a consistent effect of these culture norms and postures on (feelings of power and to what extent you take action), they may also interact to affect to what extent you’re likely to see the big picture, have a more overall view of the strategic issues you have on hand and of where the company’s going, as opposed to the nitty-gritty.
“There are so many consequences of power that we can derive from our conclusions based on these findings.”
So perhaps, in today’s globalised workplace, there is a danger for multicultural leaders in going completely native, when doing so would place them in a culturally compromising position. Li’s foreign teacher might not have felt so empowered if he’d been asked to exchange bows with students as many Asian teachers do. By the same token, for a Houston office to expect an executive from Taiwan to adopt a Texan swagger in order to “fit in” could violate the sense of cultural integrity that executive needs to feel confident and perform at his best.
At the same time, leaders must temper diversity with civility to avoid treading on another culture’s toes.
“We have to pay attention to the symbolic meaning of our postures, of our motor movements in a particular society and context,” Li says. “Not just culture, but even social context.”
Li Huang vividly recalls her first impression of a particular junior-high-school English teacher in her native city of Xi’an, China.
On the first day of class, Li recalls, the foreign-born teacher sat down and put his feet up on his desk. In talking with the teacher months later, she found out that, although his action had been an obvious Westerners’ faux pas in the eyes of his Asian students, he “felt a great sense of authority when he was striking that pose.”
Now an assistant professor of organisational behaviour at the international business school Insead, Li says that how we carry ourselves not only shapes our standing in the eyes of others, but also can affect whether we feel in control in many life situations.
Researchers suggest that the link between physicality and feelings of power has an evolutionary component, citing the expansive postures associated with dominance among several species in the animal kingdom. For Li, however, culture plays a critical yet often overlooked role.
As leadership researchers and practitioners have come to realise in the past few decades, physical gestures meant to convey leadership in one cultural context can undermine one’s authority in another. For example, Li’s English teacher later discovered, to his dismay and surprise, that, instead of thinking he was very teacher-like, Li and her classmates thought, “‘He’s such a big kid,' acting in a very rude and haphazard way,” she says.
More important, as the body language of leadership sometimes sends drastically different messages to audiences with different cultural upbringings, so body postures do not always shape leaders’ thoughts and actions in a universal way. An Asian striking a feet-on-the-desk pose would not only appear overly casual, even arrogant, to other Asians, but might also fail to draw from the posture the same sense of power that the foreign teacher did. In other words, if leaders aren’t careful, not only may their attempts to cut a commanding figure get lost in translation, they may actually make themselves feel less powerful.
Li’s research into this topic is recounted in “Stand Tall, but Don’t Put Your Feet Up,” a paper she co-wrote with Adam Galinsky, Lora Park and Lindsey Streamer for the current issue of The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
Li and her collaborators conducted a series of studies in which participants of Western and Asian descent were instructed to hold a range of postures that “were being pilot-tested for a separate study,” and immediately afterward underwent tests designed to measure how powerful they felt and how inclined they were to take decisive action. As Li expected, both Westerners and Asians experienced a greater sense of power after striking most of the more expansive poses than after adopting a more constrictive attitude.
However, the two cultures parted ways on perhaps the most expansive pose of all: leaning back in a chair with both feet propped up on a desk, as Li’s English teacher had done. For Westerners the extremely casual but dominant pose appeared to serve as a confidence booster, sending power indicators shooting up. For Asians it had the opposite effect, leaving them feeling less powerful even than the constrictive posture.
Li and her colleagues attribute these results to a divergence in Western and Asian cultural norms.
“In Western cultures the self is construed as independent, unique and separate from others,” the authors write. “In contrast, East Asian philosophies such as Confucianism and Buddhism conceptualise the self as inherently interconnected and interdependent with others.”
This fundamental distinction means that leaders from the two cultures are likely to conduct themselves differently in certain situations. It also means that the same posture may lead to different neural-endocrine responses, feelings, cognition and behaviour in leaders from the two cultures.
Indeed, when self-assertion appears to cross over into arrogance, Asians see it as a violation of their cultural norms of self-restraint, and their sense of power withers as a result.
All the experiments for the paper were conducted in the United States, Li adds.
“Even though (the participants) were in a Western context,” she says, “the cultural values that they were raised on were still very much an integral part of their cognitive structure.”
This suggests that, even among multi-culturals, the norms of one’s original culture inform ideas about what constitutes “proper” conduct for leaders, and to act against these values by adopting certain body postures can create negative feelings and actions.
Why do feelings of power matter? Do they affect work performance as well as perception?
“Another very important cognitive consequence of the psychological experience of power is the ability to see the big picture, seeing the forest for the trees,” Li says. “Since we find a consistent effect of these culture norms and postures on (feelings of power and to what extent you take action), they may also interact to affect to what extent you’re likely to see the big picture, have a more overall view of the strategic issues you have on hand and of where the company’s going, as opposed to the nitty-gritty.
“There are so many consequences of power that we can derive from our conclusions based on these findings.”
So perhaps, in today’s globalised workplace, there is a danger for multicultural leaders in going completely native, when doing so would place them in a culturally compromising position. Li’s foreign teacher might not have felt so empowered if he’d been asked to exchange bows with students as many Asian teachers do. By the same token, for a Houston office to expect an executive from Taiwan to adopt a Texan swagger in order to “fit in” could violate the sense of cultural integrity that executive needs to feel confident and perform at his best.
At the same time, leaders must temper diversity with civility to avoid treading on another culture’s toes.
“We have to pay attention to the symbolic meaning of our postures, of our motor movements in a particular society and context,” Li says. “Not just culture, but even social context.”
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