Leadership and Trust Across Cultural Boundaries: A Study of Manager-Employee Relationships in Swedish Multinational Corporations

Abstract

In an increasingly globalized business environment, multinational corporations operate across cultural boundaries, making leadership and trust in diverse teams critical organizational challenges. While existing research highlights the influence of cultural values on leadership and trust, limited attention has been given to how leadership behaviors are interpreted within culturally heterogeneous manager-employee relationships. This study aims to explore how leadership behaviors are interpreted and how trust is developed in culturally similar versus culturally different manager-employee relationships within Swedish multinational corporations. Drawing on theories of cultural values, leadership styles, and trust, the study adopts an interpretivist perspective and a qualitative research design. Data were collected through 15 semi-structured interviews across three Swedish multinational corporations, enabling a comparative analysis of culturally aligned and culturally diverse dyads. The findings show that cultural values shape how leadership behaviors are interpreted, which in turn influences trust-building processes. In culturally similar relationships, shared interpretive frameworks facilitate clearer understanding of leadership intentions, contributing to more stable trust development. In contrast, culturally different relationships often involve greater interpretive ambiguity, where identical leadership behaviors may be perceived differently, potentially complicating trust formation. The study further highlights that leadership behaviors related to participation, relational support, and performance orientation are particularly sensitive to cultural interpretation.