@conference{269, keywords = {Analytic Hierarchy Process; Diversity; Leadership; Multi-cultural, Multi-criteria}, author = {Louise Leenen and A van Heerden and Phelela Ngcingwana and L Masole}, title = {A Model to Select a Leadership Approach for a Diverse Team}, abstract = {The modern day workforce is more likely to be diverse and it is imperative for managers to be aware of the influence diversity has on leadership in their organisations. An effective leadership approach should take the diversity of a work team in terms of culture, age, gender, ethnicity and other factors into account. Although there are studies on the effect of national cultures on leadership and decision-making, many modern organisations employ an international workforce. This paper presents research on a methodology to build a decision model to support the selection of an appropriate leadership approach for a diverse team based on the composition of the team. The method to build such a decision model is based on Saaty’s well-known Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) (Saaty J. , 1990) for solving multi-criteria decision problems. AHP allows an optimal trade-off among the criteria based on the judgments of experts in the problem area. In this paper, AHP is extended to incorporate a diversity profile of the team into the decision problem. Although there are many studies on effective leadership styles, there is very limited research on the selection of an effective leadership style for a specific team. The focus of this research is on a methodology to construct a decision model for this problem and not on the social science of diversity and its influence on employees and leaders. An example is included to show how this model building methodology can be used in practice. The next phase of this research will be to populate and automate the model based on results from research on diversity and leadership. }, year = {2019}, journal = {European Conference on Business and Management Studies (ECRM)}, month = {21/06 - 22/06}, address = {Johannesburg }, doi = {doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.34190/RM.19.110}, }