From Managers to Artists and Priests: On Transformation and Development of Organizational Leaders

The collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989 and the opening up of the boundaries in Eastern Europe created an opportunity to stimulate the transfer of knowledge between Western and Eastern Europe, which had been restricted since the end of World War II. According to Zaleska (1998), the process of cultural change and the learning of Polish leaders in foreign companies in the early 1990s were inhibited due to the relations of dominance embedded in the processes and structures of multinationals. The learning and development of Polish managers often lacked opportunities for the development of key management skills in market economies: for example, leadership and strategic expertise (Kozmihski, 1993; Zaleska, 1998). The roles of Polish managers were subordinate and executive as the creative decision-making took place in multinational central headquarters. However, according to many authors (see Kostera, 1995a; Kozmihski, 1995; Zaleska, 1998), some aspects of Polish culture also contributed to a new, emerging dependency structure. As they argued, the behaviour of Eastern European managers involved such elements as unrealistic expectations and feelings of inferiority and was, therefore, partly to blame for the imperialistic behaviour of Western managers and the impediment of knowledge transfer between these parties.