International Management Behavior

Global and Sustainable Leadership

Henry W. Lane, Martha L. Maznevski

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781118527375
• eBook ISBN: 9781118788783
• Edition: 7
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

This is the seventh edition of International Management Behavior, an established text for students and executives developing the knowledge, perspective and skills required for leading and managing people in global business.

This guide provides a comprehensive overview of international management, structured around the core challenges and opportunities faced by global managers. This encompasses: the role of the global manager, working on an individual and organizational level, and understanding how to manage a diverse workforce. Individual chapters address key subjects, including: the global mindset, working effectively across cultures, strategy execution, change management and working in global teams.  This edition has been thoroughly updated to reflect recent developments in ethics and corporate sustainability.

Based on over 40 years of teaching and research, International Management Behavior 7e is designed to stimulate and facilitate learning. This text combines a wealth of theoretical knowledge with current real-world examples across a range of cultures and industry sectors. The authors focus on research that provides the most immediate, practical guidance for managers, with well-chosen examples to demonstrate practical implementation and bring key concepts to life.

To accompany the revised and updated seventh edition of International Management Behavior, updated instructor support material has been supplied at www.wiley.com/go/lane7e, including PowerPoint slides and teaching notes. This instructor site has been designed in conjunction with the main text to assist the teaching and development of global leaders.

Part 1

Chapter 1

The Global Manager

It has become cliché to say that today’s managers, wherever they are, must be internationally-minded. We have been saying it since the first edition of this book in 1988, and it seems to be more imperative with each year. In the twenty-first century, being a global leader is no longer a nice-to-have capability, it is a must-have for those who want to create value for their organizations. Recently we asked a group of executives from several countries, “How important is it for you to be a global leader – a leader who has expertise working effectively across countries?” Here are some typical responses:

Christine, head of a key product division in an industrial product firm’s largest country market, Germany: “My customers are all in Germany and so is my team, so you would think my job is all in Germany. But our company is headquartered in Scandinavia and our plants are in several different locations around Europe. When we have challenges serving our customers, the people I need to work with are mostly outside of Germany and those are the interactions that make the biggest difference in my business. Maybe even more important, my new ideas come from outside of Germany. The German market is mature, saturated, we and the customers all know what to expect. It’s when I work with people in the international arena that I learn how to build my business better within Germany.”

Ho Yin, corporate director of human resources of a Singapore-based conglomerate’s utility businesses: “You might expect that a business involved in generating, distributing and retailing electrical power is fundamentally local. But as we extend our reach to Australia, India, Southeast Asia and China, we need to identify and adopt the best practices in the industry worldwide. Regulators expect us to provide reliable service at competitive prices. To do this we need managers beyond our solid base of technical experts; people who are experienced at dealing with ideas and people from many countries and cultures, and who can lead in demanding circumstances in many different countries. Finding and developing such people is perhaps our biggest challenge.”

Jesper, a Swedish social entrepreneur working in Kenya: “My not-for-profit provides solar-powered lamps to off-grid rural areas in Kenya to empower children to study.1 My funders mostly come from the developed world, and I have close partnerships with colleagues in places like the US and Switzerland – individuals and companies – for this funding. The quality and price of the lamps is critical, so we ran an extensive global search and ended up with lamps sourced from China. The other part of my job is helping new investors come to Africa, both through investment funds I help to run, and providing advice for ethical business entry. My job is clearly global and I love that. The opportunities are enormous when you can bring the world together to address local challenges. It’s clear to me that others are seeing those opportunities too.”

Leading internationally is more complex today than it was a generation ago. At that time, “international managers” were a relatively small subset of managers, those who journeyed away from home as expatriates to do exciting things. They experienced hardship from (sometimes unexpected) foreign conditions, and rewards from generous expatriate compensation packages as well as fulfilling their need for growth and adventure.

With changes in arenas such as technology, finance, political systems, business models, air travel, and the media, most managers today work across national borders. Having a successful management career in any kind of business today requires effective international navigation. Moreover, international management today is rarely about just going from one culture to another. Typical international managers, like the executives quoted above, may travel to many different countries in any year, and frequently work with people from many different cultures at the same time. To be successful, they cannot simply learn about another culture and place, and adapt. The dynamics are much more complex.

In this chapter we discuss how the forces in the international environment are shaping the characteristics needed by global leaders. We explore what makes a leader’s task more or less global, and we comment on the relationship between management and leadership. Then we review the characteristics, competences, knowledge, and skills that effective global managers need, highlighting the global mindset and competences. The last section of this chapter addresses how to become an effective global leader: how to develop the global mindset and competences, and some principles for navigating well in global complexity. We conclude by showing how the different sections of this book can help you on your personal development journey.

More and more, managers are dealing with different cultures. Companies are going global, and teams are spread across the globe. If you’re head of engineering, you have to deal with divisions in Vietnam, India, China or Russia, and you have to work across cultures. You have to know how to motivate people who speak different languages, who have different cultural contexts, who have different sensitivities and habits. You have to get prepared to deal with teams who are multicultural, to work with people who do not all think the same way as you do.2

As we stand at the dawn of the 21st century, we must ask ourselves if we can truly manage ourselves cross-culturally. This is the principal question. A decade ago, culture was not a particular issue, but the more we advance, the more managing people of different cultures and beliefs becomes the benchmark of an efficient company.3

Carlos Ghosn, Chairman and CEO of Nissan Motor Company and Chairman and CEO of Renault

GLOBALIZATION: THE SETTING FOR INTERNATIONAL MANAGEMENT BEHAVIOR

What is globalization? The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states that “the term ‘globalization’ has quickly become one of the most fashionable buzzwords of contemporary political and academic debate” and most often is nothing more than a synonym for the spread of classical liberal, “free market” economic policies; the spread and dominance of “Westernization,” or even “Americanization” of political, economic, and cultural life; and the rise of new information technologies such as the Internet – all of which are bringing the world closer together.4 And there is often an unarticulated assumption that globalization is good.

We should remember, however, that globalization is a process and not a destination. In The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Thomas Friedman pointed out that in addition to politics, economics, technology, and culture, globalization involves issues of the environment and national security. Terrorism and pollution also have “gone global” and there can be negative aspects of globalization as well as positive, the “good and bad globalization”; and globalization can spread evil as well as good.5 On the negative side there are global criminal activities such as drugs and money laundering while on the positive there is the reduction of poverty and the increase of living standards. The Occupy movement focuses on the inequality associated with globalization, raising the voice of, in their words, “the other 99%” who are disenfranchised by globalization.6 Therefore we must be specific when we discuss globalization – the “globalization of what?”7

There is also an implicit assumption that globalization and global organizations are new phenomena. By some accounts, globalization is as old as mankind and began when people started migrating out of Africa.8 Globalization is an historical process: “Traveling short, then longer distances, migrants, merchants, and others have always taken their ideas, customs, and products into new lands. The melding, borrowing, and adaptation of outside influences can be found in many areas of human life.”9

The basic feature of globalization is that people, countries, and organizations all around the world have become more interdependent. More activities affecting more people’s lives have become more interdependent than ever before. In this book we focus primarily on the economic dimension of globalization and on companies that operate in many countries around the world and that attempt to integrate their global activities.

Recent Globalization: Transportation and Communications Connect Us

Modern globalization can be thought of as the erosion of national as well as company boundaries and the increase of economic interdependence. Trade liberalization has opened borders across which capital and products move easily. Airline travel and reliable, inexpensive communication have reduced distances and minimized the impact of physical boundaries so that corporations are able to manage far-flung operations. Alliances and networks blur the lines of organizational boundaries. The forces of deregulation, industry consolidation, and technology reshaped corporate and social landscapes. Both responding to and feeding the trend of boundary erosion, companies have been seeking to globalize.

In the early 1980s, Levitt, a pioneering observer of globalization, defined globalization as a “shift toward a more integrated and interdependent world economy . . . having two main components: the globalization of markets and the globalization of production.”10 Many academics and executives over-simplified the meaning of globalization and extrapolated it simply as “the production and distribution of products and services of a homogeneous type and quality on a worldwide basis.”11

Most of the globalization descriptions refer to an increasing global reach but from narrow perspectives. These include the number of markets served; the global reach of the supply chain and sources of supplies; the locations in which parts of the company’s value chain are located; and alliances or mergers and acquisitions to source intellectual capital (knowledge). However, such perspectives suggest that companies and executives are simply doing more of what they have always...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Index