When the Minority Rules: Leveraging Difference While Facilitating Congruence for Cultural Minority Senior Leaders

The inclusion of cultural minorities as senior leaders is of growing importance and relevance to contemporary organizations with increasingly international composition, but much is to be learned about how and when such leaders impact the workplaces they lead. We draw on the “cultural difference” and “cultural congruence” propositions (Dorfman and House, 2004) to build a model for understanding whether and under what conditions cultural minority senior leaders have an impact on the elaboration of task-relevant information and relationship conflict in their workplaces. Hierarchical regression results from a study of 315 Australian workplaces and their senior leaders suggest that, regardless of whether the senior leader is a member of a cultural minority group, an organizational climate for innovation and flexibility increases information elaboration – an effect that is stronger when the organization faces greater environmental turbulence. The results further provide support for a three-way interaction effect, whereby employees in workplaces led by a cultural minority leader have less relationship conflict when climate for innovation and environmental turbulence are both low. We conclude with a discussion of the scholarly contributions and practical implications of our conceptual and empirical work, the limitations of our study, and future directions for this research.