Page 165 - Harnessing the Strengths

148 ■ Servant-Leadership in the Intercultural Practice

orientation leads to recklessness and ignoring external sig-
nals. This absence of feedback makes one careless, which
can have disastrous results. The reverse attitude is also not
desirable. A total external orientation and pure trusting in
fate do not lead to taking action. By connecting these two
points of view, optimal results are reached. The servant-
leader does just that: connecting the inner with the outer,
courage with caution, and push with pull.

The Benchmark

In order to measure whether cultures are mainly internally
or externally driven, people were asked to respond to the
following statements:

A: What happens to me is my own doing.

In order to measure the value for typical external factors
such as fate, luck and coincidence, the following proposi-
tion was put forward:

B: Sometimes I feel that I do not have enough con-
trol over the directions my life is taking.

There was a clear difference between the cultural responses,
as evidenced in Figure 11.1.

Problems and Solutions

This last dimension is actually about “locus of control.” Is
this point within us or outside—in our environment? Said
in another way, are we the captains of our own ship, sailing
our own course, or do we follow the winds of the sea? Here,
the following tensions can arise: