ABSTRACT
In the following chapter, we seek a closer look at the understanding of leadership and how this understanding relates back to the specific culture in Switzerland. Because being Swiss does not mean to belong to a special ethnic group that has a distinct religion or language and because Switzerland is-under a historical perspective-a multicultural gathering of people from its neighboring countries with the will to form an own nation (“a nation of will”) as the only common grounds,2 we concentrate our analysis especially for the empirical findings on the German-speaking area of Switzerland, which accounts for nearly two thirds of the population.3 This allows us to focus our statements on a comparatively cohesive part of the Swiss population. Although we are aware that every country conceives leadership in many different
ways, we are trying to illustrate the core elements. The objective of our reflections is to discover what characterizes an outstanding leader in Switzerland and what, in particular, might be the cultural reason for this. The answer to this question is based on two assumptions: (a) Leadership is an attribution process that itself depends on implicit theories about leadership in the mind of the observer, and (b) These so-called “leadership prototypes” and manifestations do not occur in a vacuum but are developed and shown in a broader cultural context.
