The major objective of this study is to investigate the relationships between leadership activities and organizational effectiveness under different cultural environments such as those of Korea, China, Indonesia and Malaysia. Though leadership has been studied for relatively long time, it is still rather unclear as to be called "A Black Box". Recent leadership studies focus on leader's roles and activities which would be performed by the leaders in the field. Unfortunately, the implications of such studies of leadership roles and activities in the U.S. cannot be safely adopted to the Korean management without enough empirical tests of external validity.
In this thesis, the different leadership dimensions are derived through a surveys of each site : Korea, China (2 sites), Indonesia, Malaysia. For the validity of different leadership dimensions, which varies according to sites, in-depth interviews and statistical analysis of reliability test of variables, factor analysis, multidimensional scaling were employed. In order to investigate the relationship between leadership activities and organizational effectiveness, both quantitative analysis of statistical method and qualitative analysis of concerned materials were performed.
The major findings of this study are as follows:
In the Chinese site no. 1, where organization's employees mainly belong to the new generation under the age of 25, the most effective leadership to employee's commitment and job satisfaction is identified as the flexibility-centered leadership role which main activities are mentoring, facilitating and innovating.
In the Chinese site no. 2, where organization's employees mainly belong to the old generation of over the age of 35, the most effective leadership to employee's commitment and job satisfaction is identified as the negotiating leadership which shows coordination skills and personal relationship with their leaders within the organizations.
In Malaysia, external oriented leadership, which major activities are acquiring external resources and innovating, is effective on perceived performance and internal motivation while the internal oriented leadership is effective on commitment.
In Indonesia, employees' conceptual criteria of leadership activities are not the content but the offensiveness of the activities itself. "Not too hard" and "not too soft" leadership activities are identified to be effective on commitment and perceived performance.
Lastly in Korea, the flexibility centered leadership activities such as mentoring and innovating are effective on organizational commitment, job satisfaction and internal motivation. On the other hand, the control centered leadership activities such as monitoring, directing and producing are effective on perceived performance.
The implications of above findings are very clear. Managers who are working outside their own countries should understand the local employees' conceptual dimensions of leadership activities and should perform such activities for the effective outcomes. Headquarters of multinational companies should admit the fact that their sub-units will have their own organizational cultures, whether such differences are intended or not. For enhancing organizational effectiveness of world wide organizations, it is required to develop a locally tailored guideline of organizational behavior models.
