Leadership Styles Across Civilizational Contexts: A Cross-Cultural Empirical Study

The study aims to overcome the limitations of existing cross-cultural leadership research, which remains predominantly nation-centered and pays insufficient attention to civilizational characteristics. To achieve this objective, a geocultural civilizational framework was developed that conceptualizes leadership as a manifestation of the hidden cultural matrix of world civilization through cultural-civilizational cores and systems of cultural-civilizational regulators. A dual indicator model integrating diverse leadership theories into six pairs of complementary leadership orientations was also developed, together with a specially designed questionnaire-based expert survey involving 80 experts who evaluated 16 local civilizations grouped into three global civilizational clusters. The findings identified characteristic civilizational profiles, typological models, and cultural-civilizational distances across all structural levels of world civilization and showed that civilizations differ not in individual leadership styles but in configurations of interrelated leadership orientations. Rather than identifying a universal leadership style, the study identified an indicative trans-civilizational hybrid configuration of global leadership associated with effective functioning in a global economic-civilizational context, highlighting the growing importance of combining complementary leadership orientations shaped in different cultural-civilizational environments. Overall, the study contributes to cross-cultural leadership research by shifting the analytical focus from typological and universalistic approaches toward configurational, civilizational, and trans-civilizational analysis.