Leadership scholarship has repeatedly asked whether effective leadership travels across cultures, yet evidence is difficult to interpret when leader behaviors, follower expectations, national-level cultural indicators, organizational settings, and outcome measures are treated as interchangeable. This systematic review examines peer-reviewed evidence published from 2017 through 2024 to identify when leadership behaviors appear broadly useful, when their meaning or effects vary across cultural settings, and which mechanisms and contextual conditions help explain that variation. A verified screening ledger contained 54 formally assessed candidates, of which 38 were retained for synthesis. The evidence base combines cross-cultural meta-analyses, integrative reviews, measurement-validation studies, and multi-country or culturally heterogeneous organizational research. Across these designs, the literature does not support a simple choice between universal leadership prescriptions and unrestricted cultural relativism. Instead, several leader behaviors show recurring favorable associations while their interpretation, strength, or downstream outcomes vary with cultural values, follower schemas, team composition, ecological and institutional conditions, work design, and measurement choices. The review therefore develops a proposed context-sensitive synthesis in which leadership effectiveness is interpreted through the alignment among enacted behavior, follower meaning-making, relational or identity processes, and situational demands. This synthesis is intended as an organizing framework rather than a validated causal model. The review is bounded by heterogeneous designs, uneven cultural coverage, construct overlap, common-method risk, and the inability to treat country differences as direct evidence of individual cultural mechanisms.
