Abstract

Humanistic leadership has become an important approach in management literature. Although the conceptual grounding of the “humanism” manifesto goes back to many centuries, building a humanistic leadership theory in social sciences is a relatively new endeavour. Development of humanistic leadership theory has become the focus of academic researchers, especially from the lens of culturally diverse context. This chapter extends one of these attempts aiming to understand humanistic leadership practices and behaviours in the United Arab Emirates (Anadol and Behery 2020) and aims to reveal how the cultural structure of the country, its traditions, customs and the point of views of the rulers of the country affect the humanistic leadership approach in the context. An exploratory research method is followed and it is found that the UAE governments’ presence in economical and societal affairs is very strong and leaders’ humanistic leadership approach is generally influenced by three main cultural factors, Bedouin/Arab traditions, Islamic values and the National Agenda of the UAE. Some of the main themes covered in this chapter are respect, dignity protection, tolerance, fairness, generosity, humility, responsibility and leadership development. It is interesting to see the communalities on how the country’s leaders and the prominent leaders’ humanistic approaches coincide and are coherent with the UAE’s cultural roots. This chapter will provide an overview of these examples and try to link those to humanistic leadership theory by explaining how humanistic leadership themes are implemented in the UAE context.