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Embracing non‐Western Contexts in Management Scholarship

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Abstract

Management is a global phenomenon. Yet, the vast majority of empirical investigations and theoretical explanations of management, managers and those being managed that are published in leading management journals are based on research that predominantly originates from Western contexts, particularly the USA and the larger European countries. Non-Western contexts, in turn, reside at the periphery of mainstream management scholarship. This is problematic for multiple reasons. It provides an inherently limited view on the contextual factors that may explain variation in management practices across the globe, and it leads to a reductionist view of non-Western contexts to offer little more than a means for teasing out the boundary conditions of mainstream ‘Western’ theories. This exclusion of non-Western contexts has resulted in a marginalization of non-Western scholarly voices, who are often hesitant to submit their research to leading scholarly journals. To address these interrelated problems, we use this introduction to the Thematic Collection on ‘Embracing non-Western contexts’ in the Journal of Management Studies to call on scholars to more fully embrace non-Western contexts in their research, and in doing so, to unleash the explanatory potential of these contexts for our understanding of management.

Being Aware of Death: How and when Mortality Cues Incite Leader Expediency Versus Servant Leadership Behaviour

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Abstract

The COVID-19 crisis has been associated with existential concerns regarding mortality. These concerns, described as ‘mortality cues’, can influence people's emotions, behaviours, and the quality of leadership in organizations. Using the contingency model of death awareness (CMDA; Grant and Wade-Benzoni, 2009), we provide new evidence on how mortality cues can incite negative and positive leadership behaviours via two forms of death awareness: death anxiety and death reflection. Specifically, we theorize that mortality cues can increase leader death anxiety, giving rise to leader expediency (a leader's use of unethical practices to expedite work for self-serving purposes); however, mortality cues can also facilitate leader death reflection and, consequently, servant leadership behaviour. We further suggest that leaders’ responses to mortality cues depend on their psychological capital (PsyCap), such that leaders with high (vs. low) PsyCap respond to mortality cues with less expediency (via death anxiety) and more servant leader behaviours (via death reflection). We support our hypotheses through three separate studies using an experiment, time-lagged data from healthcare workers, and daily diary data from non-healthcare professionals. We conclude that mortality cues have a double-edged influence on leadership behaviour. We also discuss the theoretical and practical implications of the findings.