Exploring servant leadership across cultures: comparative study in Australia and Indonesia A.A. Pekerti a * and S. Sendjaya b a UQ Business School, The University of Queensland, Ipswich, Queensland, Australia; b Department of Management, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, Australia This study extends the GLOBE study of 62 societies by investigating an emerging model of servant leadership (SL) across cultures. SL is a holistic and altruistic approach of leadership that focuses on the commitment to serve other people. Adopting Implicit Leadership Theory’s (ILT) premise that people hold cognitive categories to distinguish between prototypical leaders from non-leaders, we predicted that SL would exist in Australia and Indonesia, but its practice would be moderated by culture. Our predictions were supported, SL was perceived to be culturally universal in Australia and Indonesia. However, the different attributes perceived to make up SL were not all rated as equally important. We argued that individual self-construal, socialization and national context would explain how and why culture-specific perceptions of SL exist. The implications of our study on international management practice are discussed in the concluding section. Keywords: culture-specific; culture universal; implicit theory of leadership; self- construal; servant leadership Introduction In their chapter’s conclusion on leadership and cultural variation Dorfman, Hanges and Brodbeck (2004, p. 711) re-iterated the pervasive question asked in the cross-cultural management literature, ‘Does culture influence leadership, and, if so, why and how?’ The answer was partly given in Dorfman and House’s (2004) review of extant work on leadership, namely, there is still no definitive answer since the evaluative interpretations of leadership vary across cultures. Furthermore, Dorfman et al. (2004, p. 709) emphatically rejected the convergence hypothesis by suggesting that modernization may in fact contribute to societies ‘striving to preserve their cultural heritage’ (also see Blyton 2001). Notwithstanding this, the Global Leadership and Organizational Behaviour Effectiveness (GLOBE; House, Hanges, Javidan, Dorfman and Gupta 2004) project’s exemplary approach of creating a cultural-level theory of leadership, indicates that culture does influence leadership in a number of dimensions. We are still left with a number of open questions regarding the ‘why and how’ of variations that was found among cultures concerning leadership behaviours and perceptions of what contributes an effective leader. This study extends the GLOBE study of 62 societies (House et al. 2004) in that we adopt implicit leadership theory (e.g., Lord, Foti and Phillips 1982) to acknowledge the fact that the concept of leadership can encapsulate a diverse range of meanings and from different points of reference. We investigate an emerging leadership construct (Servant ISSN 0958-5192 print/ISSN 1466-4399 online q 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/09585191003658920 http://www.informaworld.com *Corresponding authour. Email: a.pekerti@business.uq.edu.au The International Journal of Human Resource Management, Vol. 21, No. 5, April 2010, 754–780