Why the Western Lens Still Rules Leadership – And Why It’s Time for Eclectic Leadership

Leadership. The very word conjures visions of charismatic CEOs, revolutionary politicians, and history-making generals. But step back for a moment and ask: Whose vision of leadership is it? If you’re imagining a lone figure at the helm, boldly navigating a competitive world, chances are your mental blueprint is profoundly Western—and you’re not alone.

A World Led by Western Theories

Let’s start with the hard data. Nearly all the heavyweight leadership theories we quote at conferences or cite in boardrooms were born and bred in Anglo-American or Western European soil:

Theory	Origin	Key Figures
Transformational Leadership	USA	James MacGregor Burns, Bernard Bass
Servant Leadership	USA	Robert Greenleaf
Situational Leadership	USA	Hersey & Blanchard
Trait Theory	UK/USA	Thomas Carlyle, Gordon Allport
Behavioral Theories	USA	Ohio State & Michigan Studies

These giants of leadership literature emerged from corporate, political, and academic cultures where individualism, rationality, and performance reign supreme. Put plainly: the world’s playbook for leadership mostly comes with a Western accent and Anglo-Saxon footnotes.

Academic Publishing: The Home Turf Advantage

It gets more systemic. Most high-impact journals in leadership studies are published in English, based in the US or UK, and peer-reviewed by Western scholars. If you’re a Nigerian academic with a ground-breaking take on Igbo communal leadership, for example, getting your work published in “Leadership Quarterly” without recasting it through Western terms is a Herculean task.

A telling study by Jackson (2012) in Leadership showed African philosophies are often underrepresented or reframed with Western labels—a bit like forcing a jazz musician to read only classical scores.

The Cross-Cultural Challenge: When the Shoe Doesn’t Fit

Aspiring global leaders, beware: the “leadership DNA” described by Western theorists may not match what’s admired in Tokyo, Lagos, or Riyadh. Hofstede’s cultural dimensions research and the sweeping GLOBE Study (spanning 62 countries) both found stark differences in what people expect from leaders.

• In collectivist cultures (think East Asia, Africa), group harmony and relationships trump the lone “change agent” heroics so adored in Anglo models.

• This isn’t just an academic quibble—it’s the difference between inspiring a team and accidentally alienating them.

I’ll pause here for a personal footnote: I have a thing about the term ‘culture’ itself; it just doesn’t make the sense it used to anymore. But that’s a tangle for another blogpost!

Conceptual Bias: The Unseen Hand

Scratch the surface of a standard leadership framework and you’ll find assumptions like:

• Leaders act as independent agents (individualism)

• Success = performance/results

• Leadership is hierarchical by nature

These aren’t universal truths; they’re reflections of Western Enlightenment and capitalist work cultures. Try transplanting them wholesale into a Maori iwi (tribe) or a rural Indian collective, and watch the confusion (or resentment) grow.

What’s Missing? A Feast of Alternatives

The world isn’t lacking in leadership models. It’s just that most don’t make the global syllabus:

• Ubuntu Leadership (Africa): Community, humility, interconnectedness.

• Confucian Leadership (East Asia): Moral virtue, harmony, hierarchical respect.

• Islamic Leadership: Ethical service, trust (amanah), justice.

• Indigenous Leadership: Oral tradition, context, deep land-based wisdom.

Too often, these are treated as “exotic flavours” or forcibly filtered through Western frameworks: Ubuntu becomes “authentic leadership,” Confucianism is dubbed “values-based leadership,” and so on.

Why Eclectic Leadership is the Key

Imagine leadership as a buffet, not a set menu. When we only serve Western dishes, we miss out on global flavours that could answer today’s most complex challenges.

• Eclectic Leadership says: Let’s stop playing by just one rulebook and blend the best from every tradition. Like a jazz improviser weaving together blues, swing, and fusion, the eclectic leader knows that local context matters—and that different cultures have powerful, time-proven ways to lead.

Statistics don’t lie: If the GLOBE Study’s findings are right, over 80% of the world’s working population operates in contexts where pure Western models don’t fully fit. Why force a square peg into a round hole?

Change the Conversation

Next time you talk “leadership”, ask yourself: are you seeing the whole field or just the part under the stadium lights? Challenge your organisation to study, not sideline, non-Western approaches.

Encourage your teams to seek wisdom from Africa, Asia, Indigenous communities—anywhere leadership is practiced with authenticity.

Because only when we embrace the eclectic, do we truly lead for the world we live in. Let’s stop talking about “one size fits all” and start dressing for the global stage.

Food for thought: If you want leaders who can unite a fractured world, isn’t it time we dine at a much bigger table?

Yours sincerely,

Shehzaad Shams

London, 02 August 2025

References:

Jackson, T. (2012), Leadership, 8(4), 425–444.

House, R. J. et al. (2004), Culture, Leadership, and Organizations: The GLOBE Study of 62 Societies.

Hofstede, G. (2001), Culture’s Consequences.

Bolden, R. & Kirk, P. (2009), International Journal of Cross Cultural Management.

Chin, J. L. (2010), American Psychologist.

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