The expression of compassion in leadership in inter-cultural organisational situations: the case of Japanese leaders in India

Abstract

In this paper, we examine the role played by compassion in leadership in intercultural situations. Focusing on the growing and important economic context of Indo-Japanese business, we develop a model that identifies contingent factors that affect Japanese leaders’ expressions of compassion in intercultural organizational contexts. We engage with the spiritual capital construct and analyse leaders’ lived experiences leading to a novel extension of the well-established Nested Spheres Model of Culture. By adopting an inductivist and social constructivist approach, semi-structured interviews with Japanese business leaders operating in India are employed to generate data. The empirical data show how changes in time and place cause deeply embedded cultural values (such as compassion) to surface and become more explicit in leadership. The study also underlines the need to explore the wider spatial, temporal, and economic contingencies that affect both the dynamics of compassion in ‘intercultural’ business situations and spiritual leadership in intercultural contexts.

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