Comparison of male Saudi Arabian business managers' self-rated leadership styles in one organization: Influence of education origin

The Saudi government is reducing its dependency on foreign workers through a broad campaign of labor force indigenization commonly called Saudization (Shah, 2006). The drive to replace expatriate workers with Saudi nationals has been pursued along two broad paths: direct labor market intervention and human resources development, including sending students abroad to gain education in the West. The purpose of the current quantitative study was to examine whether differences existed between the geographic-cultural locus of college or university education and the self-rated composite leadership style scores on the MLQ Form 5X within a sample of 200 Saudi Arabian male managers. Specifically, the study examined results between a group of Saudi managers educated in the West and another educated solely in Saudi Arabia. No females were employed in the company. The study revealed that neither the Western-educated male Saudi managers nor the locally educated male Saudi managers exhibited strong adherence to a set of leadership behaviors indicative of a particular leadership style...