Introduction: setting the scene for leadership in Asia

Leadership continues to be an on-going focus of scholarship, despite its contested definitions, meanings and nature. The Asian region has become an important area of inquiry with its rapid and enormous economic growth and potential, size, and population. Our work will accomplish multiple purposes. We will better understand how leadership processes and practices are both different and the same in countries within Asia. We will help managers learn how to become better leaders by recognizing and adopting successful practices. As a result, we hope to move beyond the overly dominant and ethnocentric Western leadership literature and explore Asian leadership on the basis of differing cultural foundations. Through innovative Asian leadership practices, we anticipate that Asia will not only export products and services, but in the near term will also export leadership processes and practices.