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Tribally owned American Indian enterprises provide a unique cross-cultural setting for emerging Native American business leaders. This article examines the manner in which American Indian leaders negotiate the boundaries between their indigenous organizations and the nonindigenous communities in which they do business. Through a series of qualitative interviews, we find that American Indian business leaders fall back on a strong sense of “self,” which allows them to maintain effective leadership across boundaries. This is highly consistent with theories of authentic leadership. Furthermore, we find that leaders define self through their collective identity, which is heavily influenced by tribal affiliation and tribal culture. We add to the literature on authentic leadership by showing the role that culture and collective identity have in creating leader authenticity within the indigenous community.

Historically examining the cultural foundation for traditional leadership within the Blackfoot Confederacy, composed of the Blackfeet (Pikuni or South Piegan) in Montana, USA, and the North Piegan, Blood (Kainai), and Blackfoot (Siksika) in Alberta, Canada, reveals that authority for leadership is grounded in tribal spirituality. This spiritual authority is integrated within traditional and complex structures that organize the social structures of the Blackfeet, a structure of extended family, bands, and societies that all influence leadership. Traditional leadership authority arises through medicine bundle rituals, ceremonial rites, and protocols that exist within the Niitsítapi (Blackfeet people) worldview. Understanding the complex foundations of traditional tribal leadership facilitates future research and understanding of Indigenous leadership, especially when international borders separate tribes.

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to develop two new constructs (career self-schemas and career locus) and present a conceptual model of the influence of Native American culture on MBA fit.Design/methodology/approach– Using a social cognitive lens on career theory, the authors examine the possible effects of cultural influences on the fit between Native Americans’ career goals and an MBA. Specifically, the authors propose that cultural factors contribute to career self-schemas inconsistent with Native American perceptions of business graduate education. Career self-schemas are an individual’s cognitive map of the self in his or her career.Findings– The conceptual model proposes that aspects of career self-schemas may explain lagging Native Americans’ MBA fit: the MBA is culturally inconsistent, and a community career locus.Research limitations/implications– The model needs to be tested empirically. This research has implications that extend beyond Native Americans to help explain the career aspirations of other diverse groups.Social implications– Native Americans are, in recent years, engaging in economic development that would benefit from Native Americans with MBAs. The authors make recommendations for increasing Native American interest in MBA programs.Originality/value– This paper introduces the constructs of career self-schemas and career locus to explain lagging MBA fit for Native Americans. The constructs may also be applied in other cultures and with other ethnic groups to explain differences in career choice. It may be particularly helpful in an international context.

This commentary examines the use of American Indian culture in the strategic marketing of goods and services produced from within the American Indian community. Building on concepts from multiple academic disciplines, we introduce a new construct for this practice: the "culture-of-origin" effect. Specifically, the culture-of-origin effect is the strategic use of one's cultural identity as a resource that increases the value of one's products. Moreover, we explore the ethical ramifications of exploiting one's cultural identity for capital gain by highlighting the quandary that emerges when individuals seek to profit from a resource (cultural capital) that belongs collectively to the tribe.

The authors present a Coyote story to illustrate Native American perspectives on time, teaching, and learning. Coyote stories invoke Indian Time, a traditional Native American perception of time that progresses through events rather than minutes on a clock. Coyote, a trickster, wanders and investigates, interacting with animate creatures and inanimate objects. He inspires us to pursue creative, multidirectional approaches of understanding and reflective, self-discovered approach to learning. Whereas management and management education typically edify a single-time perspective, that of clock time, you may find wisdom in nonlinear Indian Time and reflective learning through timeless stories.

Circles are symbols of interconnectedness. Behavioral circles can be vicious or virtuous. Many American Indians are caught in a vicious circle of exclusion from the purported benefits of Westernization, entrapment in its negative elements, and the ongoing undermining of their culture and thus their identities. Yet Native Americans, along with many indigenous peoples the world over, are holding fast to traditional values. Indigenous knowledge systems include spiritual orientations that, in the face of the social and environmental issues facing humanity, may provide an alternative set of values for generating life-enhancing business behavior. The authors introduce management educators to Native American values generally and specifically to four traditional Lakota values: bravery, generosity, fortitude, and wisdom. Management education might move toward to an inclusive, virtuous circle through respect for Native American values as an equally valid alternative to dominant management values.

In this symposium we will explore possibilities for Indigenous organizations to become a force for decolonization. Business enterprises owned and operated by Indigenous communities are one way for ...

In this chapter, we explore the ways in which the dominant wisdom, economic, and social traditions of the West can potentially integrate with some of the wisdom, economic, and social traditions of indigenous and Eastern cultures in the interest of creating a more complete understanding of links between wisdom, economics, and organizing. Western thinking tends to be based not only on a modality of constant growth but also on a worldview that is based on linear thinking and atomization and fragmentation of wholes into parts as paths that lead to understanding. These ways of thinking have resulted in the West’s putting economics, materialism, consumerism, and markets ahead of other types of values and issues. In contrast, many indigenous and Eastern traditions offer a more holistic, relationally based set of perspectives that might provide better balance in approaching issues of work, economics, and organization. Indigenous wisdom traditions, illustrated through African, Chinese, Indian, Islamic, Japanese, Māori, and Native American worldviews, offer insights into a worldview of relatedness where foundational values inform members of society on how to lead a wise life through serving others, including the environment. We believe that by integrating the perspective of wisdom traditions that offer these more holistic, interconnected, and nature-based views of the world, Western traditions could be more appreciative of the intrinsic worth and ontological differences of people and environment and that such perspectives can be very useful in our globally connected, interdependent, and, in many ways, currently unsustainable world. We offer this synthesis as a beginning of that conversation.

Tribally-owned American Indian enterprises provide a unique cross-cultural setting for emerging Native American business leaders. This paper examines the manner in which American Indian leaders neg...

Cultural capital was introduced by Pierre Bourdieu as a way to describe how people can draw upon a deep understanding of their own culture and use their deep cultural knowledge to bring parity to t...

American Indian tribes today assert their inherent political sovereign rights recognized in the United States Constitution. Tribal gaming has been a very visible expression of tribal sovereign rights. A much less visible and empirically examined aspect of economic sovereignty is private entrepreneurship. An initial expectation from tribal gaming was spillover into entrepreneurial ventures by tribal members. However barriers exist inhibiting private business practice by individuals on some Indian reservations today, one barrier being a perception that private entrepreneurship contradicts egalitarian tribal values assuming that American Indians have never practiced capitalism, and thus businesses should be owned and managed collectively by tribal governments. This paper presents a historical examination of trade as practiced in North America before and after European and American incursions into what is today's U. S. northwest and southwest. This paper reveals that, contrary to assumptions, trade practiced ...