Managers today are often required to deal with employees from different cultures, either because they are posted to manage overseas branches or face an increasingly diverse workforce at home. New research suggests they may be putting a foot wrong if they get too caught up in focusing on the cultural differences.

Jiing-Lih Farh of HKUST and his co-authors report that there is greater variation between individuals than between cultural groups, and managers need to bear this in mind.

"The prevailing wisdom in the cross-cultural management field advises managers to alter their leadership behavior to fit the particular cultural profile of each country in which they manage. But such advice doesn't consider individual variations in cultural values such as power distance orientation," they say.

They acknowledge that power distance - how a person values status, authority and power in organizations - has indeed been shown to vary between countries. For example, employees in China show higher power orientation than those in the U.S., meaning they tend to be more submissive around managers and perceive their leaders as superior and elite. However, their research finds that individual variations are more pronounced than those between countries.

They focus on the effect of transformational leadership on people with different power distance orientations. Transformational leadership can motivate employees and increase their sense of belonging, and thereby increase their sense of procedural justice or fair play in the workplace. It can also motivate them to do extras at work in the form of organizational citizenship behavior (OCB).

However, the authors find it does not have a uniform effect on people with different power distance orientations. In tests on managers in China and the US, transformational leadership was more welcome by people with a lower power distance orientation because they felt empowered and hence more motivated, and they perceived this type of leadership as being more fair. This in turn led them to perform more OCB.

The same effect was not seen in people with higher power distance because they already perceived their leaders as fair and did not find transformational leadership motivating.

"Although employees were more likely to have higher levels of power distance orientation in China than in the U.S., individuals in both countries reacted differently to transformational leadership on the basis of their individual power distance orientation," the authors say.

"The main implication, irrespective of country-level cultural variation, is that transformational leadership is especially important for managers whose employees have a low power distance orientation. The age-old 'when in Rome [act as Romans]' advice perhaps should be modified to 'when in Rome, get to know Romans as individuals'."

The authors note that managers may need to tailor their behavior to different employee groups. Those with low power distance could be subject to transformational leadership, while those with high power distance orientation could be treated with a more paternalistic style of leadership that gives them firm direction in executing tasks. They suggest organizations could ease this process by identifying an employee's power distance orientation when hiring, training and evaluating their staff.