Journal of Occupational Psychology zyxwvutsrq (1989), zyxwvu 62, 97-109 zyxwv 0 1989 The British Psychological Society Printed in Great Britain 97 On the generality of leadership style measures across cultures* Peter B. Smith? School of Social Sciences, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton, BNI 9QN, UK Jyuji Misumi Faculty of Human Sczences, Nara University, Japan Monir Tayeb Department of Business Organization, Hwiot- Watt University Mark Peterson College zyxwvuts of Business Administration, Texas Tech University Michael Bond Department of Psychology, Chinese University of Hong Kong It is proposed that cross-cultural studies of leadership style have failed to distinguish adequately between global characterizations of style and the specific behaviours which leaders need to use in a given culture if a particular style is to be attributed to them. A study is reported of perceptions of electronics plant supervisors in Britain, the USA, Japan and Hong Kong, derived from Misumi’s PM leadership theory. The findings indicate that characterizations of P(Performance)and M(Maintenance) leader style have a similar factor structure in each culture. However, the specific behaviours associated with those styles differ markedly, in ways which are comprehensible within the cultural norms ofeach setting. The study illustrates how a series of emic correlations within each culture sample may be used to test the validity of etic models of leader style. Research into styles of leadership has been dominated for several decades by a series of distinctions among different types of leader. While such distinctions clearly date back to the studies by Lewin, Lippitt zyxwvu & White (1939), the most enduring typology has been that provided by the Ohio State University researchers (Fleishman, 1953) with their distinc- tion between consideration and initiating structure. Contemporary thinking has moved rather sharply away from the oversimple notion that a global measure of leader style could by itself account for any substantial amount of the variance in subordinate performance, and the Ohio State measures have been shown to be defective in a variety of ways (Schriesheim & Kerr, 1974). Nonetheless, leader style continues to figure largely in the various conceptualizations of person-situation interaction which are seen as providing a A version of chis paper was presented at the 2lst International Congress of Applied Psychology, Jerusalem, July 1986. t Requests for reprints.