Leadership in Diversity Management

<p>Many researches on leadership found that "Task” and "Human” were the two major dimensions of leadership. There seems an assumption that those leadership researches were based on certain organizations where homogeneous members did relatively simple and routine tasks. PM (Performance and Maintenance) theory (Misumi and Shirakashi, 1963; Misumi and Tasaki, 1965) fits this type of leadership in homogeneous organization. However, another leadership should be necessary for diversity management with heterogeneous members. As a case of diversity management, this study focused on leadership of Japanese managers to their foreign young employees in traditional Japanese companies. The purpose of this study is to explore a new leadership theory by expanding PM theory. In this study, 10 pairs (20 people) of foreign young employees and their managers at seven Japanese companies were interviewed. Foreign young employees were classified into two groups. The first group had low motivation with loneliness and passive career perspective. Leadership behaviors of this group's mangers were Task Performance and Human Maintenance. The second group had high motivation with strong organizational commitment and positive career perspective. This group's mangers had two new leadership behaviors. One was to create new tasks so that foreign employees could work for their organizational missions (Task Creation). The other was mutual learning between foreign employees and their Japanese managers (Human Synergy). These behaviors were based on an equal relationship between leaders and followers. Based on these results, a theoretical matrix was proposed with Task-Human dimension and Homogeneity-Diversity dimension. Then leadership behaviors with Task Creation and Human Synergy, which can be called “CS theory”, was developed. Task Creation is possible because there is not a job description in Japanese human resource management. CS theory might be able to explain an essential leadership behavior for diversity management especially in Japanese companies. In a future study, a quantitative survey is necessary to examine the proposed CS theory which is distinguished from PM theory.</p>