As the world’s economies are becoming increasingly integrated into global trading relations, the need to understand cultural influences on leadership has never been greater. The paper examines the usage of five leadership practices of transformational leadership (Kouzes & Posner, 1987) by MBA students from six diverse nations from five continents: United States, Nigeria, Slovenia, South Korea, India and Argentina. Multi-factor ANOVA was performed to determine the strength of the impact of national culture on leadership. A measure of the effect size (eta-squared), which provides a percentage of variance in the usage of five transformational leadership practices explained by the nationality of respondents, was obtained. 

 To correct for the differential effects of various errors and biases a person-standardization was performed and results compared to “normal” results. The major conclusion is that the culture does have a small, but significant impact on the usage of transformational leadership behaviors – on average it explains around 5% of the observed variation in the usage of transformational leadership practices in the six countries studied (even when the gender and age of the respondents are controlled for). Although the strength of the cultural influence on leadership is quite small in absolute terms, culture explains much more variation than other, more “traditional” moderator variables, such as gender, age, or work experience.

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