The challenge of cross‐cultural leadership interaction: Finnish expatriates in Indonesia

International assignments are becoming more and more typical parts of a managerial career. As an outcome, cross‐cultural leadership competencies are required within international companies. Still, real cross‐cultural leadership interaction between expatriate managers and their local subordinates has not been much studied. In the light of this, the goals of the present study were to analyse whether and how expatriate managers adjust their leadership style due to cross‐cultural differences, and whether and how local subordinates perceive the styles of expatriate managers to differ from the styles of local managers after possible adjustments. The data were collected by interviewing Finnish expatriate managers and their Indonesian subordinates in real cross‐cultural business settings with a bicultural interview team.