Viking leadership: How Norwegian transformational leadership style effects creativity and change through organizational citizenship behavior (OCB)

Abstract

This article examines the distinct "Viking" leadership style of top leaders in the Norwegian industry that has evolved from a harsh and violent history. Earlier studies have reported that Norwegian leaders at the middle manager level rate high in transformational leadership traits due to a strong feminine culture and a low power distance society, yet Norwegians are also highly individualistic which differs significantly from other national cultures with feminine traits and collective societies. This unique cultural combination is becoming a cross-cultural issue as the Norwegian society is becoming more heterogeneous, particularly in work settings. Understanding how this leadership style differs from other cultures, even in Scandinavia, is important to help leaders better understand the effects of their leadership style on performance. In this study, we explored four of the original Hofstede national cultural dimensions, specifically, power distance, femininity-masculinity, individualism-collectivism, and uncertainty avoidance and examined how these are reflected at the top leadership level within the Norwegian industry using a national leadership study of Norwegian top leaders (N ¼ 917). We also examined how these selfreported leadership styles affected perceived organizational results in the form of innovation and change through organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). Our findings suggest that Norwegian top leaders do exhibit transformational leadership traits, and that these traits have a positive influence on OCB, which further had a positive relationship to organizational performance in the form of innovation and change results. We also found that power distance and a collectivistic orientation predicted OCB, while only power distance predicted innovation and change among the Hofstede cultural dimensions. Of the four Hofstede dimensions, only one moderating effect

Taking the Pandemic by Its Horns: Using Work-Related Task Conflict to Transform Perceived Pandemic Threats Into Creativity

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Transformational leadership and organizational citizenship behaviour: the role of job autonomy and supportive management

“…Voluntary and extra-role behaviours, different from in-role performance behaviours (Lofquist and Matthiesen, 2018), that are beyond the formally recognized job description and reward system, referred to as organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB; Organ, 1988), are crucial for organizational effectiveness (Khaola and Coldwell, 2019;Nielsen et al, 2012;Podsakoff et al, 2014) as these behaviours support effective organizational functioning (Majeed et al, 2017) both in terms of team and individual performance. Given its crucial importance to organizations (Sun and Henderson, 2017;Maaitah, 2018;Hackett, 2018), OCB has been one of the most researched and published topics (Khaola and Rambe, 2020;Podsakoff et al, 2000;Podsakoff et al, 2009) and a host of predictors of OCB have been Job autonomy and supportive management 1409 identified in the past research (Dai et al, 2018;Salas-Vallina et al, 2017a, 2017b.…”