Citation: Gardner, D.G.; Wickramasinghe, V. Relationships between Leadership Styles and Prosocial Motivation Depend on Cultural Values: A Case Study in Sri Lanka. Merits 2023, 3, 445–458. https://doi.org/10.3390/ merits3030026 Academic Editors: James Stuart Pounder and Wendy M. Purcell Received: 6 May 2023 Revised: 15 June 2023 Accepted: 3 July 2023 Published: 6 July 2023 Copyright: © 2023 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). Article Relationships between Leadership Styles and Prosocial Motivation Depend on Cultural Values: A Case Study in Sri Lanka Donald G. Gardner 1, * and Vathsala Wickramasinghe 2 1 Graduate School of Business Administration, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, CO 80918, USA 2 Department of Management of Technology, Faculty of Business, University of Moratuwa, Moratuwa 10400, Sri Lanka; vathsala@uom.lk * Correspondence: dgardner@uccs.edu Abstract: Organizations are increasingly concerned about their social and environmental responsibil- ities and are interested in developing strategies to improve their performance and accountability in these areas. One such strategy focuses on leadership styles, by which leaders are selected or trained to address the needs of people and entities outside themselves (i.e., stakeholders), and subsequently inspire their followers to do the same. Implicit in this strategy is an assumption that a new type of leadership is required to achieve social and environmental responsibility goals. In this study, we offer a different perspective by proposing that leaders may only need to be encouraged or trained to emphasize some aspects of their existing leadership styles, while minimizing the use of others. We focus our study in Asia, where a paternal leadership style is prevalent, and often expected by followers. This leadership style consists of behaviors that may be organized into three dimensions: authoritarian, benevolent, and moral. We propose that the benevolent and moral dimensions reflect leadership styles that promote followers’ social motivation and examine their interaction with the self-transcendent values of their followers in predicting followers’ prosocial motivation to help others through their work. We found that only the benevolent dimension was significant and appeared to compensate for low self-transcendent values in followers. Implications for using leadership to promote social responsibility are discussed. Keywords: leadership; paternal leadership style; personal values; self-transcendent values; prosocial motivation; corporate social responsibility 1. Introduction Organizations are increasingly concerned about their social and environmental respon- sibilities and are interested in developing programs and implementing actions to improve their performance and accountability in these areas. Collectively, these initiatives are of- ten called corporate social responsibility (CSR), which can be defined as “context-specific organizational actions and policies that take into account stakeholders’ expectations and the triple bottom line of economic, social, and environmental performance” [1] (p. 855). Noteworthy in this definition is that private-sector organizations seek to maximize profits, but also seek to improve the social and environmental contexts in which they operate. The three objectives embodied in CSR need not be incompatible, because effectively developed CSR programs can simultaneously enhance profits while “doing good” (e.g., [2,3]). For example, Kim, Milliman, and Lucas [4] found that employees’ perceptions towards orga- nizations’ CSR initiatives influence their affective organizational commitment, which has positive downstream relationships with key performance indicators like intention to stay with the organization. Other research provides evidence for the potential of leadership styles to promote pro-environmental behaviors in employees [5,6]. We build on this latter Merits 2023, 3, 445–458. https://doi.org/10.3390/merits3030026 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/merits