Humanistic leadership in the UAE context

Purpose The main intention of this paper is to understand humanistic leadership through an eminent leader representing the United Arab Emirates (UAE) culture. The authors identified a prominent humanistic leader of a well-known private university in Dubai as an example, analyzing his leadership approach from a humanistic lens and demonstrating humanistic leadership characteristics linked to the cultural roots. Design/methodology/approach This paper is designed as a single case to examine how humanistic leadership behaviors and practices are applied in an organization and how they are connected to the UAE culture. The leader and his seven followers are interviewed by using semi-structured forms, and inductive conventional content analysis was utilized to identify common themes and concepts related to humanistic leadership traits in the UAE. Findings The paper highlights ten themes named humility, respect, care, fairness, transparency, well-being orientation, generosity, family focus and will with humanistic determination. These themes coincide with the various well-accepted humanistic literature theories and are also aligned with salient Islamic values and the existing humanistic leadership theories. A humanistic leadership description is provided to show the implications to the UAE context. Research limitations/implications This study only focuses on a single higher education institution, and further studies need to be conducted to reach a generalization. Practical implications The paper offers an alternative humanistic leadership for government departments, semi private and private companies to create an organizational culture where those values are flourished and creating an awareness in youth leadership programs to include humanistic leadership principles that will eventually increase social welfare. Originality/value This study provides an insight into humanistic leadership phenomenon by giving a contextual example from the UAE. As there has been no attempt to link humanistic leadership to the UAE culture, the findings of this paper will contribute to cross-cultural leadership research.