How Am I Doing? 360-Degree Feedback in Asia

I recently returned from Singapore, where I taught an executive MBA class in Global Leadership to a group of mostly Asian managers and executives. As part of the course, they were required to participate in a 360-degree feedback process using a a popular instrument, the Leadership Practices Inventory (Kousez and Posner, 2012). For many of them, although they were working for global, multinational companies, it was the first time they had experienced this kind of feedback from others – their managers, their co-workers, and others.

Now I know that it is simplistic to make generalizations about Asian cultural values, and even more so with this class (with students representing at least six different nationalities, including a few American expatriates). My class was certainly not representative of Asians in general, nor even of Asian managers in general. As scholars such as House et al. (2004) have shown, there are at least two distinct cultural clusters in Asia: Confucian Asia (e.g. China, Singapore, South Korea) and Southern Asia (e.g., India, Malaysia, Thailand). Hofstede (2001) and others have pointed out that Asian cultures tend to have higher Power Distance and Collectivism scores than Western cultures. More specifically, Power Distance tends to be higher in Southern Asia than in Confucian Asia, while Collectivism is higher in Confucian Asia than in Southern Asia. Southern Asia managers more so than Western managers tend to value leaders who are somewhat more authoritarian and more decisive in their decision-making; Confucian Asia employees value work places where harmony, relationships, and group recognition rather than individual achievements and confrontation are emphasized. In addition, as Ready et al. (2008) point out in their HBR article on attracting talent in emerging markets, employees from these markets (which include Asian countries such as China and India) value work place cultures that emphasize meritocracy, opportunities to learn and develop, and a strong connection to their teams and to their company. I kept these contextual factors in mind as I coached my students around their feedback and their reactions. Having spent time with these students, both as a group and individually through one-on-one coaching sessions with their 360-degree feedback results, the following are three impressions I have about their reactions to feedback, and how these tie to the use of 360-degree feedback in Asian cultures.

First, these managers and executives were eager not only to understand and learn about their feedback, but to also figure out what they could to do to develop themselves. When I met with each of them, they had already pored over their results and were especially interested in the written comments, some of which they claimed never to have heard before from others in such overt fashion. This is perhaps consistent with the generally non-confrontational and high-context language in many of these Asian cultures, especially among peers. About half had asked people outside their work place to give them feedback, including childhood friends, elderly relatives, parents’ friends, and their spouses. Many had actually already shared their results with their spouses.

Second, perhaps because educated Asians were focused on grades as they were going through school, many of my students were particularly interested in the numerical scores and the percentile ratings. They wanted to know how “good” they were, and tended to view the results as a sort of report card. While coaching them, I suggested reframing their view of these results not as a grade, but as developmental feedback. As I explained to them, the ratings are based not on how well or how poorly they were demonstrating certain leadership behaviors, but on how frequently their raters observed them performing these behaviors. It is certainly possible that in the context in which they interacted with some of their raters, these raters did not have an opportunity to view some of their leadership behaviors. For example, a family friend who provided ratings may not necessarily have observed the manager “challenging the process” (one of the leadership categories in the Leadership Practices Inventory).

Third, consistent with the higher Power Distance among these cultures, many students focused on the discrepancies between their ratings and their managers’ ratings. What was interesting was that of the 30 specific leadership practices, not one showed a statistically significant difference between self-ratings and managers’ ratings as well as for all observers’ ratings for the class as a group. Eckert et al. (2009) had reported in their comparisons of rating discrepancies from 31 countries that cultural values affected these discrepancies. For example, they found that self-ratings and observer ratings were more discrepant (with the former significantly higher than the latter) in high Power Distance cultures versus low Power Distance cultures.

In this small sample, I did not find this to be the case. Among my class, I also did not find differences in self-manager discrepancies among those from Confucian Asia and those from Southern Asia. There are several possible explanations for this. First, many of these students work in large companies with established performance management practices. While 360-degree feedback may not be universally practiced in these companies, regular performance reviews with one’s manager certainly are. Second, as some students explained to me, they tended to be “hard” on themselves and were downplaying their own self-ratings (similar to some research around gender issues that suggests that females tend to provide lower self-ratings then males). This was interesting, since another study (Gentry et al., 2010) found a “leniency bias” among its sample of Asian managers, and others have found such a bias in general when comparing self-ratings and observers’ ratings (e.g., Church, 1997); that is, self-ratings were more favorable than ratings by other sources. Third, as Gentry et al. (2010) have suggested, it might be that those with greater agreement on their ratings with their managers are in fact better performers. My class (most of whom were taking their executive MBA class with the approval of, and in some cases, the financial support of their companies) was most certainly reflective of this population of high performers. Fourth, especially for those in countries where Collectivism is a strong cultural value, supervisors, co-workers and others might have a tendency to inflate their ratings a bit in the spirit of preserving harmony. This might be the case especially for those who may believe that their ratings might not be anonymous.

Overall, I found receptivity to 360-degree feedback to be very positive. The students did not seem to go through the “SARA” feedback stages - from Shock to Anger to Resistance/Rejection and finally to Acceptance (Zenger and Folkman, 2010) – and were eager to move on and identify steps they could take to improve their leadership. Based on this small sample, there do not seem to be serious concerns about implementing 360-degree feedback in these cultures. In fact, use of 360-degree feedback is fairly common in many multinationals today, both Western and non-Western. In a study of over 650 organizations in the Asia Pacific region, for example (Mercer, 2013), 45% of organizations report that they do use 360-degree feedback; and 42% of them report that they provide individuals new in a global role with 360-degree feedback within the first year of their new assignment.

Unlike even say, twenty years ago, many Asian managers today are being constantly exposed to Western management practices, whether through their organizations, their formal education in school, or through the internet. This does not mean that cultural and contextual factors should be ignored, and that cultural preferences no longer exist. Some of these cultures are over two thousand years old, and their beliefs and assumptions are very deep-seated. It would be naïve to suggest that these values can change in a generation or two. Yet changes at least in work place practices are indeed coming, and perhaps accelerating. In the U.S. culture, for example, individualism has continued to be a very strong cultural value, yet we see collaboration and team work practices being emphasized and in many cases embraced in the work place. Companies such as Goldman Sachs and Accenture have implemented programs in their Japanese offices to help local employees interact more effectively with their Western colleagues and clients. With continued globalization, we will most likely see a greater evolution and transformation of work place practices around the world.

Church, A. (1997). Managerial Self-Awareness in High-Performing Individuals in Organizations. Journal of Applied Psychology, 82: 281-292.

Eckert, R. et al. (2010). “I Don’t See Me Like You See Me, But Is That a Problem?” Cultural Influences on Rating Discrepancy in 360-degree Feedback Instruments. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 19 (3): 259-278.

Gentry, W. et al. (2010). Self-Observer Rating Discrepancies of Managers in Asia: A Study of Derailment Characteristics and Behaviors in Southern and Confucian Asia. International Journal of Selection and Assessment, 18(1): 237-250.

Hofstede, G. (2001). Culture’s Consequences (2^nd Edition). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

House, R. et al. (2004). Culture, Leadership and Organizations: the GLOBE Study of 62 Societies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Kousez, J. and Posner, B. (2012). The Leadership Challenge (5^th Edition). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Mercer Consulting Group. (2013). http://www.mercer.com/content/dam/mercer/attachments/global/Talent/Develop-APLdrshpDevPractStudyRpt.pdf

Ready, D. et al. (2008). Winning the Race for Talent in Emerging Markets. Harvard Business Review, 86, November.

Zenger and Folkman (2010). http://zengerfolkman.com/meet-sara-our-emotional-response-to-bad-news/

Are Narcissists Better Leaders?

We all know who they are – those narcissists who seem to rise quickly in organizations only to crash and burn eventually. We can point to failed corporate leaders such as Bob Nardelli of Home Depot, Tony Hayward of BP and Ken Lay of Enron as prime examples of such leaders. However, others point to leaders like Steve Jobs and Jack Welch, who are seen by some as narcissistic and yet have led their companies to great success. So how do we sort out the relationship between narcissistic leaders and team/organizational success or failure?

Some researchers say that not only do we like narcissists, but they tend to make for better leaders. Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer (2015) has argued that narcissism “helps people attain leadership positions in the first place and then, once in them, positively affects their ability to hold on to those positions, extract more resources (salary), and even helps in some, although not all, aspects of their performance on the job.” (pp. 71-72). In summarizing a meta-analysis of individual differences related to effective leadership, he points to four traits that he says narcissists have more of: energy, dominance, self-confidence, and charisma. He also explains that one of the reasons why women and Asian Americans are less frequently chosen for leadership roles is because they are on average more modest and self-effacing, and therefore less narcissistic than men. Finally, he claims that companies prefer “immodest, grandiose, and narcissistic leaders” (p. 83) and they continue to select and promote those who exhibit these qualities.

It’s important to gain some clarity on this concept of narcissism since there is much confusion about what it is in the first place. For example, Kets de Vries (1994) has pointed out that narcissism is not necessarily dysfunctional; there is a difference between healthy or constructive narcissism and unhealthy or destructive narcissism. He suggests that there are three different types of narcissists: the reactive one who is cold, ruthless and exhibitionistic, and has a sense of entitlement; the self-deceptive one who is Machiavellian and who lacks empathy; and the constructive one, who is ambitious and self-confident. In their view, the constructive narcissist can become a good leader; in fact, “a certain dose of narcissism is necessary to function effectively” … and … “we all show signs of narcissistic behavior.” (p. 588). Similarly, Maccoby (1990) refers to “productive narcissists” who may be good for an organization, although even they should not be left unchecked. However, in my experience, it is not always easy to distinguish between these different types of narcissists. Not all those who are energetic, dominant, self-confident and charismatic are pathological narcissists.

The American Psychiatric Association (APA) has a diagnosis of Narcissistic Personality Disorder and lists criteria such as the following: grandiose sense of self-importance, preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success or power, and a belief in one’s special or unique status. “Subclinical” or non-pathological narcissism is different; whereas pathological narcissism is associated with arrogance, a need for admiration, and a lack of empathy, subclinical narcissism is defined as having an inflated sense of self-importance and extremely high levels of self-esteem. A widely-used measure of subclinical narcissism is The Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) scale, which scores people on narcissism based on their responses to statements such as: People always seem to recognize my authority, I really like to be the center of attention, I am apt to show off if I get the chance, and I always know what I am doing.  

An important contribution to this topic is a recent study by Grijalva et al. (2015), who did an extensive meta-analysis of the literature. They start out by stating that there is no consensus on the relationship between narcissism and leadership. Their meta-analysis focuses on studies of subclinical narcissism, and what they found was very interesting. First, narcissism is related to leadership emergence, although that relationship decreased over time; that is, the longer the leader spent time with followers, the weaker the relationship. We are attracted to individuals with “leader-like” qualities such as those that Professor Pfeffer has mentioned (e.g., dominance, self-confidence). However, according to these authors, to know them is not to like them too much. Second, they found that when the effects of extroversion were sorted out, that relationship weakened considerably. In other words, much of the reason for why narcissists are selected as leaders is because they are also extroverted.

Third, Grijalva and her colleagues also found a wide range of relationships between narcissism and leadership effectiveness. On average, narcissists were no more or less likely to become effective leaders. The authors in fact found an inverted U-shaped relationship; leaders who are weak as well as those who are very strong narcissists don’t tend to become effective leaders.

My own experience supports the research evidence that self-confident, sociable and likeable people are more likely to be selected and promoted into leadership positions. A recruiter I know once explained to me that his corporate client wanted him to find an executive with “gravitas” or “executive presence.” A self-confident and charming manager who is technically competent and gets results will in many Western organizations get promoted before the equally competent, results-oriented manager who is perhaps too self-effacing and introverted.

I also believe that productive narcissists can contribute to team and organizational success - to a point. Perhaps, as Grijalva et al. suggest, there is a level in which too much narcissism becomes dysfunctional. I would argue however that there are two elements of narcissism that if left unchecked, can be fatal in the workplace: an overriding interest in fulfilling one’s own needs versus the organization’s needs, and a lack of empathy or humility. I would not disagree with those who would argue for example that both Steve Jobs and Jack Welch were narcissistic; yet it was clear that both also subordinated their personal needs for the good of their organizations. This passion they had for putting their organization’s needs ahead of themselves (for the most part anyway) was important to their respective companies’ success.

How do narcissists fare in other cultural settings? There is evidence that displays of extreme self-confidence are not always welcome in non-Western contexts. In an interesting study, Zhang et al. (2015) suggest that paradoxical leadership behaviors are actually aligned with the Eastern yin-yang philosophy, where two opposing forces can be integrated. Among the paradoxical behaviors they identified are those associated with combining self-centeredness (certainly a component of narcissism) with other-centeredness. Others include the following:

·      Shows a desire to lead, but allows others to share this leadership role

·      Likes to be the center of attention, but allows others to share the spotlight as well

·      Insists on getting respect, but also shows respect toward others

·      Has a high self-opinion, but shows awareness of personal imperfection and the value of other people

·      Is confident regarding personal ideas and beliefs, but acknowledges that he or she can learn from others.

They found that among their samples of Chinese students, a combination of narcissism and humility was related to leadership effectiveness. While these authors suggest that humility may counterbalance narcissism, will different cultures accept lesser or higher levels of narcissism and humility depending on where their cultural values are in terms of power distance, individualism, and uncertainty avoidance? And what about context? When individuals perceive threats to their environment, do those who show narcissistic characteristics tend to be perceived as better leaders?

In the meantime, here are a couple of take-aways from all this research. First, individuals who wish to aspire to leadership roles would do well to adapt some leader-like skills such as energy and self-confidence. However, the extent to which these are displayed may depend on culture and context. For example, Cain (2012) has suggested that introverts and Asian-Americans can become successful leaders by using more of their soft power, such as having strong convictions and persistence. Note, however, that using soft power does not mean reducing one’s energy or self-confidence. Second, organizations should be careful in being seduced by those who may have the sizzle but not the steak (an expression I once heard from an executive when describing the dangers of picking style over substance). Learning to distinguish between constructive and pathological narcissists may be difficult, but it is important for organizations to avoid hiring and promoting the latter.

Cain, S. (2012). Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. New York: Broadway Books.

Grijalva, E., Harms, P., Newman, D., Gaddis, B., and Fraley, R.C. (2015). Narcissism and Leadership: A Meta-Analytic View of Linear and Nonlinear Relationships. Personnel Psychology, 68: 1-47.

Kets de Vries, M. (1994). The Leadership Mystique. The Academy of Management Executive, 8 (3): 73-92.

Maccoby, M. (2000). Narcissistic Leaders: The Incredible Pros, the Inevitable Cons. Harvard Business Review, Janurary-February.

Pfeffer, J. (2015). Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time. New York: HarperCollins.

Zhang, Y., Waldman, D., Han, Y., and Li, X. (2015). Paradoxical Leader Behaviors in People Management: Antecedents and Consequences. Academy of Management Journal, 56 (2): 538-566.

In the Work Place, Is It Better to Receive Than to Give?

By now, students of organizational behavior are probably familiar with Professor Adam Grant’s research on givers and takers, which he has summarized in his book Give and Take (Grant, 2013). Grant has found that people have three general interaction styles: taking, giving and matching. Takers, according to Grant, like to get more than they give. They believe in a dog-eat-dog world, like to promote themselves, and make sure they get credit for their efforts. It’s a looking-out-for-me mentality. Givers on the other hand pay more attention to what other people need from them, sometimes helping others without expecting anything in return. Their focus is on acting in the interests of others. Matchers try to balance the two and believe in a fair exchange.

While people may shift their interaction style based on their different roles and relationships, Grant claims that everyone has a primary style. Most of us (about 55-60% by his estimate) are typically matchers in the workplace. However, what he has found is that givers tend to be more successful in their careers than either takers or matchers, although they are also the least successful. This is because there are two types of givers. The successful ones tend to be more selective on who to help, when to help and how to help. Those who are not may become doormats and spend too much of their time helping others and not getting their own work done.

Matchers (and they are the vast majority of us) don’t like takers because they violate a sense of justice and fairness. Furthermore, according to Grant (Dearlove, 2014): “ … as the world shifts to become one that’s more about collaboration and service than it has been in the past, it’s going to be harder and harder for takers to succeed.”

Grant has done a number of studies with colleagues to validate his concepts, and a recent study by Keysar et al. (2014) also has supported his findings. They conducted a series of experiments in which they found that positive actions by subjects were reciprocated, but negative actions (in other words, subjects who were takers) not only were not reciprocated, but led to even more selfish responses. Their conclusion was that there are different patterns of reciprocity: “ … people reciprocated in like measure to apparently prosocial acts of giving, but reciprocated more selfishly to apparently antisocial acts of taking.”

Grant points out that these interaction styles do not seem related to personality traits. In fact, he has found that the correlation between agreeableness (one of the so-called Big Five personality traits) and giving-taking is virtually zero. There are agreeable takers and disagreeable takers, just as there are agreeable givers and disagreeable givers. Interaction style is more about intentions and motives.

What about cultural differences, however? This concept of reciprocity and fair exchange is indeed fairly common in the Western workplace, which is dominated by what the behavioral economist Dan Ariely (2008) refers to as market norms. Many of our social exchanges in the work place are based on cost-benefit trade-offs. How does reciprocity work in other cultures, and do similar dynamics take place?

Interestingly enough, other cultures do have their own terms to describe these types of exchanges. Most of us have probably heard of the Chinese concept of guanxi, which is based on Confucian beliefs about hierarchy and relationships. Creating exchanges of favors builds relationships between parties, and is considered as essential to doing business successfully in China.  These social connections built through guanxi generate loyalty, dedication and trust. In their meta-analysis of fifty-three empirical studies, Luo et al. (2012) found a linkage between guanxi and organizational performance; guanxi enhances organizational performance and confirms the value of guanxi networks on firm performance in greater China.

Smith et al. (2014) proposed that there are three related attributes that characterize a guanxi relationship between subordinates and their supervisors: strong affective attachment (an emotional connection to care for one another), inclusion of one’s personal life within the relationship (the degree to which supervisors and subordinates include each other in their private or family lives), and deference to the supervisor. They developed measures for each of these attributes, and collected data from managers in eight nations (e.g., Brazil, India, Russia, and the United Kingdom) including two Chinese cultures. Their results indicate that both affective attachment and deference demonstrated “metric invariance” across the eight nations sampled, while the personal-life inclusion scale (as they predicted) did not. While guanxi is indigenous, aspects of it do indeed exist in other cultures.

In the Philippines, the concept of utang na loob also describes a web of reciprocity and exchange of favors. According to Hunt et al. (1963, p. 62):

“Every Filipino is expected to possess utang na loob; that is, he should be aware of his obligations to those from whom he receives favors and should repay them in an acceptable manner … One cannot measure the repayment but can attempt to make it, nevertheless, either believing that it supersedes the original service in quality of acknowledging that the reciprocal payment is partial and requires further payment.”

Here are two key take-aways for global managers. First, the good news. The concept of reciprocity seems to generalize across cultures, and universally everyone at least in the work place seems to understand and acknowledge the importance of fairness. For managers supervising others from different cultures, applying basic management principles such as treating people fairly and using a matching style of interaction would seem to work well. In addition, a taker style is not likely to win you many friends nor help you become successful, regardless of the culture where you are working.

I say this in spite of what Pfeffer (2015) recently wrote about the norm of reciprocity. In his book, Leadership BS, Pfeffer claims that “when people are in an organizational as contrasted with an interpersonal setting, they feel less obligation to repay favors and, in fact, are less likely to do so.” (p. 177) He cites a couple of studies he has conducted where people felt less likely to return favors when these favors were in the context of the work place. He concludes that in work settings people view others strictly in terms of whether they can be useful to them in the future. However, many do view work places as not simply a place where they can earn a living and where every day is a Darwinian, win-lose struggle. People do form strong bonds in the work place, not just with their peers and colleagues, but also with their bosses and with the companies they work for. In Japan and other non-Western cultures, especially, people’s identities are very much tied to their companies and the lines between transactional, market-driven norms and social norms do get blurred.

Second, at the same time, the basis for how such exchanges can lead to trust and effective working relationships with others seems to be influenced by culture. In particular, using Ariely’s distinction, non-Western cultures rely more on social norms while Western cultures rely more on market norms in these exchanges. While guanxi, utang na loob and similar concepts imply a kind of matching, they are not based strictly on transactional terms. Ariely acknowledges that it is challenging when you mix social norms with market norms.

While a giver style might be preferable, global managers still need to understand the specific cultural context and cultural norms in the different cross-cultural settings in which they may find themselves. In particular, recognizing that in non-Western cultures the intention of these exchanges is to build relationships and not necessarily to get something back in return quickly is an important distinction that Western global managers need to be aware of in succeeding cross-culturally.

Ariely, D. (2008). Predictably Irrational. New York: Harper.

Dearlove, D. (2014). Give and Take: An Interview with Adam Grant. http://thinkers50.com/blog/give-take-interview-adam-grant/

Grant, A. (2013). Give and Take. New York: Viking.

Hunt, C. et al. (1963). Sociology in the Philippine Setting. Quezon City, Philippines: Phoenix Publishing House.

Keysar. B. et al. (2008). Reciprocity Is Not Give and Take. Psychological Science,19 (8), 1280-1286.

Luo, Y., Huang, Y. and Wang, S. (2012). Guanxi and Organizational Performance: A Meta-Analysis. Management and Organization Review, 8 (1), 139-172.

Pfeffer, J. (2015). Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time. New York: Harper.

Smith, Peter B., et al. (2014). Are Guanxi-Type Supervisor–Subordinate Relationships Culture-General? An Eight-Nation Test of Measurement Invariance. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 45 (6): 921-938.