The impact of culture on Swedish leadership and its implications for doing business internationally

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2018 in the subject Business economics - Business Management, Corporate Governance, grade: 1,0, FH OÖ Standort Steyr, language: English, abstract: This thesis aims at understanding how culture influences the leadership style of Swedish managers and the implications that this has for other countries in doing business with them. Additionally, this thesis seeks to understand which impact globalization has on cultures and how this might influence national identity.

In order to grasp the versatile field of culture, this thesis starts with finding a generally accepted definition for this multilayered topic. After that, it examines three culture models by Schein, Hall and Hofstede, three well-known scholars in the field of culture, who should help graphing culture by the means of their models. This thesis conceptualizes the similarities within the mentioned culture models. As for any country analyzation it is important to understand that no one is to judge another culture, therefore this thesis will briefly introduce the topic of cultural relativism in order to prevent any misconceptions.

As mentioned, this thesis aims at understanding how globalization is influencing cultures. Therefore, this paper elaborates on three different scenarios on how globalization influences the cultural identity. These so-called three H's of cultural globalization are analyzed to identify how globalization might change the cultural world view.

The following chapter, which focuses on analyzing Swedish culture, firstly introduces Sweden by means of the SIMM and Hofstede's culture onion and secondly by using a dialectic approach to analyzing culture, namely Hofstede's dimensions and the Yin-Yang principle. This mutuality of concepts shall help understanding the complexity of a culture analysis.

Within the penultimate chapter, the topic of leadership is generally defined and Swedish leadership style analyzed by the GLOBE study, followed by a selected leadership model, the Competing Values Framework. This model is firstly defined and in a next step merged with previous findings from Hofstede's Dimensions, the GLOBE study and the Yin-Yang principle. The combination of these models shall help answering the main research questions.

In the last chapter, the author summarizes the main findings by answering the research questions. To conclude this thesis, the limitations of this work are outlined, as well as possible future research.