Leadership in Papua New Guinea: exploring context and barriers

Abstract

The unique context and challenges of leadership in Papua New Guinea are not adequately explained by the extant literature. This paper investigates the context of, and barriers to leadership, in Australia’s closest northern neighbour, as PNG attempts to actively participate in a dynamic, rapidly changing global environment. Historically, PNG is a diverse Nation of tribal societies organised on the basis of kinship. Major leadership challenges include more than 800 distinctive, often mutually unintelligible languages, a community based society each functioning on a basis of local custom, tradition, values, and dissimilar governing systems. The paper finds that leadership theories based on ‘Western’ culture are not directly transferable to PNG, and that significant contextual barriers exist to inhibit the leadership process in PNG.