Leadership and the
Cultural Conundrum of Body Language
Leaders
don’t all walk and talk the same. Staying true to one’s culture is integral to
empowered leadership.
Li
Huang vividly recalls her first impression of a particular junior-high English
teacher in her native city of Xi’an, China.
On
the first day of class, Li says, the foreign-born teacher “sat down, putting
his feet up on the desk…” In talking with the teacher months later, she found
out that, although committing an obvious Westerners’ faux pas in the eyes of
his East Asian students, “He felt a great sense of authority when he was
striking that pose.”
Now
an Assistant Professor of Organisational Behaviour at INSEAD, Li says in
addition to shaping our standing in the eyes of others, how we carry ourselves
can affect whether we feel in control in many life situations. “The mind and
body are so closely tied together,” she argued in an interview with INSEAD
Knowledge. “They work in tandem; they have a reciprocal relationship. And body
postures can actually lead to neural-endocrine shifts such as increased
testosterone and decreased cortisol as well as have a causal impact on how we
feel and act.”
Researchers
argue the link between physicality and feelings of power has an evolutionary
component, citing the expansive postures associated with dominance among
several species in the animal kingdom. But for Li, culture plays a critical yet
often-overlooked role. As leadership researchers and practitioners have
come to realise in the last few decades, physical gestures meant to convey
leadership in one cultural context can undermine one’s authority in another.
For example, Li’s English teacher later discovered to his dismay and surprise
that, instead of thinking he was very teacher-like, Li and her classmates thought,
“‘He’s such a big kid.’ Acting in a very rude and haphazard way.”
More
important, just as the body language of leadership sometimes sends drastically
different messages to audiences with different cultural upbringings, Li argues,
body postures do not always shape leaders’ thoughts and actions in a universal
way either. East Asians striking a feet-on-the-desk pose would not only appear
overly casual and even arrogant to other East Asians but may also fail to draw
the same sense of power from the posture as the foreign teacher. In other
words, if leaders aren’t careful, not only could their attempts to cut a
commanding figure get lost in translation, they might actually make themselves
feel less powerful too.
Taking Up Space
Li’s research into this topic is recounted in Stand tall, but don’t put your feet up: Universal and
culturally-specific effects of expansive postures on power, a paper she co-authored
that was recently published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
Li
and her collaborators administered a series of studies where participants of
Western and East Asian descent were instructed to hold a range of postures that
“were being pilot-tested for a separate study”, and immediately afterwards
underwent tests designed to measure how powerful they felt and how inclined
they were to take decisive action. As Li expected, both Westerners and East
Asians experienced a greater sense of power after striking most of the more
expansive poses (e.g., leaning forward with both hands spread out on a desk),
than after adopting a more constrictive attitude (sitting with hands tucked
underneath their thighs).
However,
the two cultures parted ways on perhaps the most expansive pose of all: leaning
back in a chair with both feet propped up on a desk, just like Li’s English
teacher. For Westerners, the extremely casual but dominant pose appeared to
serve as a confidence booster, sending power indicators shooting up. For East
Asians, it had the opposite effect, leaving them feeling even less powerful
than the constrictive posture.
Pride versus Humility
Li
attributes these results to a divergence in Western and East Asian cultural
norms. “In Western cultures, the self is construed as independent, unique and
separate from others,” the paper states. “In contrast, East Asian philosophies
such as Confucianism and Buddhism conceptualise the self as inherently
interconnected and interdependent with others.” This fundamental distinction
means leaders from the two cultures are likely to conduct themselves very
differently in certain situations: compare the modest posture of Toyota’s CEO
Aiko Toyoda to the triumphant stance of GM chief Daniel Akerson. It also means
that the same posture may lead to different neural-endocrine responses,
feelings, cognitions, and behaviours in leaders from the two cultures.
Indeed,
when self-assertion appears to cross over into arrogance, East Asians see it as
a violation of their cultural norms of self-restraint, and their sense of power
withers as a result.
Li
is quick to point out that all the experiments for the paper were conducted in
the United States. “Even though [the participants] were in a Western context,
the cultural values that they were raised on were still very much an integral
part of their cognitive structure,” she said. This suggests that even among
multiculturals, the norms of one’s original culture inform ideas about what
constitutes “proper” conduct for leaders and to act against these values by
adopting certain body postures can create negative feelings and actions.
The Expansive Perspective
Why
do feelings of power matter? Do they impact work performance as well as
perception? Extrapolating from her findings, Li said, “Another very important
cognitive consequence of the psychological experience of power is the ability
to see the big picture, seeing the forest for the trees. Since we find a
consistent effect of these culture norms and postures on [to what extent you
feel powerful and to what extent you take action], [posture and culture] may
also interact to affect to what extent you’re likely to see the big picture.
[They can influence your] having a more overall view of the strategic issues
you have on hand and [your understanding] of where the company’s going as
opposed to the nitty-gritty [operational perspective].There are so many
consequences of power that we can derive from our conclusions based on these
findings.”
So
perhaps in today’s globalised workplace there is a danger for multicultural
leaders in going completely native, when doing so would quite literally place
them in a culturally compromising position. Li’s foreign teacher might not have
felt so empowered if he’d been asked to exchange bows with students as many
East Asian teachers do. By the same token, for a Houston office to expect an
executive from Taiwan to adopt a Texan swagger in order to “fit in” could
violate the sense of cultural integrity that executive needs to feel confident
and perform at his best.
At
the same time, leaders must temper diversity with civility to avoid treading on
another culture’s toes. “We have to pay attention to the symbolic meaning of
our postures, of our motor movements in a particular society and context. Not
just culture, but even social context,” Li said.
Li Huang, INSEAD Assistant Professor of Organisational Behaviour, with Benjamin Kessler, Web Editor
Read more at http://knowledge.insead.edu/leadership-management/leadership-and-the-cultural-conundrum-of-body-language-2994?nopaging=1#srWyPwu7VlfJedAv.99
