Essay About United States And Management Orientation Of Employees

Management Orientation of Employees in the United States
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Abstract:
This paper examines the management orientation of employees in the United
States by comparing the leadership perception of 484 respondents from the Alaska and
Florida regions. It appears that Americans have a significantly higher score on the
relationship-orientation than task-orientation. Similarly, the variables of gender, age and
work experience produced similar results, showing a significantly higher score for the
relationship orientation for these Alaskans and Floridians. The study also presents
practical recommendations, suggestions for future research and implications of the study.
Key words: Relationship, task, leadership, culture, Americans, Alaska, Florida and the
United States.
Journal of Behavioral Studies in Business
Task and relationship orientation, Page 2
Introduction
In todays competitive workplace, it is crucial for managers and entrepreneurs to
understand their leadership orientation as well as employee behavior (Bass, 2008). In a
global context, culture plays an important role in the behavior of people. Indeed, Adler
(1993) argued that national culture has a greater impact on employees than does their
organizations culture. Thus, management must focus on developing appropriate
management methods that are relevant to the national culture rather than just optimizing
organizational culture (Thomas and Au, 1999; Trompenaars, 1993).
Notwithstanding the important role of culture, managers and expatriates must
understand not only the culture of the country or region in which they do business
(Hofstede, 2001); they must also reflect on the relationships and tasks at hand in order to
be successful and to create long-term value for their organization.
It is almost impossible for a manager or a company to be successful without
knowledge and understanding of the inner strengths and weakness of the people in the
organization. Managers should also know the dominant personalities and task and
relationship orientation of people in the organization. This is especially important in
collectivistic cultures (Kagitcibasi, 1994, Watkins and Liu, 1996) where the quality of
social interactions between individuals depends heavily on whether or not they belong to
the same in-group and therefore a relationship orientation is an important aspect of the
leaders role.
While this assertion is true in more collectivistic cultures, the U.S. is an
individualistic culture (House and Aditya, 1997), especially when compared to Thailand
(Mujtaba, 2009), Taiwan (Huang and Mujtaba) and Philippines (Mujtaba and Balboa,
2009). It will be interesting to see the general tendencies of Americans and to determine
their leadership orientations in terms of task and relationship orientation. Therefore, the
purpose of this study is to examine the task and relationship orientation of respondents in
the United States and to discuss how it may relate with or differ from orientations in more
collectivistic cultures. In other words, are Americans more task oriented or relationship
oriented in their leadership orientation?
The United States and its Culture
The behavior of people usually reflects their native cultures. People from the
United States are highly individualistic (House, Hanges, Javidian, Dorfman and Gupta,
2004). Therefore to others from more collectivistic cultures, Americans from the United
States may at times be perceived as ethnocentric, egoistic, materialistic, and impatient
due to their individualistic and task-oriented life styles (Mujtaba and Balboa, 2009).
Young American children are taught to be creative and innovative by thinking of their
own ideas. Being rebellious and going against the majority can be considered positive for
the American society as it is one sign of critical thinking and individualism. For example,
unlike many other parts of the world, American children are encouraged to show their
individualistic behavior through the choices in their dress code