The Meeting of Cultures : Effective Leadership in Multicultural Organisations

Abstract: Globalisation has simplified the internationalisation process for companies, and are today not only constrained to multinational companies, as SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises) are entering global markets in order to attain a sustainable competitive advantage. As a result, more Swedish SMEs are now operating abroad, and SSA (sub-Saharan Africa) is a region that has shown great potential. SSA has a rapid economic growth and greater political stability, and SMEs that enter SSA has many opportunities to gain as it is a fairly unexplored region with a boosting economy. However, working in SSA would entail that Swedish SMEs and its leaders would encounter different cultures and trying to find a way of coping with the differences successfully. The purposes of this study, is, therefore, to explore what cultural challenges Swedish SME leaders face in SSA, and how they adapt to the cultural challenges. The researchers chose a qualitative research strategy with an abductive approach and conducted semi-structured interviews with eight Swedish SMEs leaders that are currently active in SSA. The respondents hold various leading positions within these companies. Our empirical findings suggest that there are several cultural challenges that Swedish SME leaders face in SSA, such as time perception, gender inequality, collectivistic behaviour and trust issues. However, the existing hierarchical system in SSA was seen as the main challenge as the leaders were used to a flat organisations structure in Sweden, whereas the culture in SSA advocate authoritarianism. The leaders that choose to adapt their leadership style become more controlling, which shown improvement on the employees performance. Our findings also indicate that some of the leaders did want to adapt their leadership style but instead sought to transform the current culture in SSA based on a Swedish Model.