Global Leadership

A Transnational Perspective

Gama Perruci

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351666794
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The clash of cultures, coupled with rapid technological advances, seems to be pushing us in paradoxical directions. On the one hand, the world seems to be falling apart; while on the other, the world seems to be converging. Do we have thoughtful leaders to guide us through these uncertain times? As globalization breaks down barriers, global leaders are becoming more visible players on the world stage. From executives of multinational corporations (e.g., high-tech entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley) to social activists (e.g., Malala Yousafzai), individuals from many different cultural backgrounds and ages are reshaping the way we see global leadership. These global leaders have to contend with a variety of transnational contexts that call for different leadership styles. This book assesses four of these styles – transactional, participatory, transformational, and directive – with representative case studies for each. It provides practical skills that global leaders must master in order to be more effective at the transnational level – cultivating a global mindset; developing intercultural communication; leveraging diversity and inclusion; and managing intercultural conflict.

Global Leadership is valuable reading for educators in undergraduate and graduate leadership programs; practitioners involved in global for-profit and nonprofit organizations; and leadership educators interested in exploring the impact of technology on global leadership. It provides an excellent balance between the study and practice of global leadership.

Part I

Framing global leadership

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Global leadership is a thriving field of study. As globalization becomes increasingly more salient in our everyday lives, we are turning to our leaders with the expectation that they will provide effective leadership in a complex global environment. The first part of this book is designed to introduce you to this complexity from both an intellectual and a historical perspective.

On the intellectual side, the study of global leadership can be viewed as a unique subset of the general field of leadership studies. In this section, we define leadership in terms of five components – leaders, followers, goals, context, and cultural norms. The research literature on global leadership has dramatically expanded in recent decades because the global context is shifting. Our concepts and assumptions about leadership should, therefore, be revisited, and even questioned. We are also paying more attention to the way different cultures view leadership.

On the historical side, we also need to understand the implications of change and the emergence of a new global context. The 21st century is dramatically challenging long-standing assumptions about the way leaders and followers relate to one another. Through a deep understanding of history, we are able to acknowledge that we truly live in a new era. In Part I, I suggest that new global processes have given rise to a new category of leader – the global leader (distinct from local, national, and international).

Armed with a more thorough grasp of the global forces shaping leadership in this new century, we are then able to explore the importance of the new global context and the influence of ever more complex cultural interactions. In the past, we took for granted that leaders and followers operated under the same cultural norms and values. Globalization has forever changed that assumption. We now need to take into consideration how leaders and followers integrate their individual norms and values into an effective and coherent leader–follower relationship. In Part I, we will lay the conceptual and historical foundation, which you can then use to develop a greater appreciation for the role of context in global leadership (Part II), and the increasing importance of intercultural competencies of a global leader (Part III).

1 The study and practice of global leadership

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The world is shrinking, and everywhere we turn, we are seeing the effects of globalization.¹ We are truly living within a new global context, and that obviously affects the way we view leadership. Global leadership refers to the study of leadership within this new global context. In the past, the leader–follower relationship was treated as if it were taking place in a contextual vacuum. Today, we recognize that we need a deeper understanding of how cultural norms and values influence leadership. We want to know how leadership works in a transnational environment.

This shift in mindset – from a context-free assessment of leadership to a complex view of the global dynamic of leadership – is the core topic of this book. However, before we get there, we need to first introduce the history of scholarship within the field, so you can understand the intellectual roots of global leadership. This chapter begins with a brief overview of leadership scholarship in the past century. This broad view of the field helps us understand why the old approaches cannot adequately explain leadership under the new global context. Highlighted in this chapter are the recent contributions made by scholars such as Edward Hall, Geert Hofstede, and Robert House.

Scholars and practitioners are not only seeking to understand how global leadership works in the 21st century, but also how global leaders can become more effective in this new global context. There is a high degree of interest in the acquisition of practical skills in this area. Therefore, this chapter includes references to the work by Richard Lewis in the development of a useful model to understand different cultures’ perspectives on leadership.

The “traditional” leadership literature

Discussions and debates about leadership are not new. In accounts of historical events, leadership has been a recurring theme. Our perspective on history is often framed in terms of leaders, followers, their aspirations, accomplishments, and defeats.² Our greatest philosophers, both from the Western and Eastern traditions, had something to say about leadership as a human phenomenon. While Plato envisioned the education of an elite as “Philosopher-Kings,” Laozi exhorted his students to view leaders as servants. And that was 2,500 years ago! More “recently,” Niccolò Machiavelli advised his readers in the early 1500s to set aside morality and approach leadership as a pragmatic enterprise. We all seem to have an opinion on how leadership should work.

While our interest in this topic may be from time immemorial, the empirical study of leadership dates back only a century. Mark Mendenhall refers to this earlier scholarly work as the “traditional” leadership literature, to make a distinction from the “global leadership” literature.³ Before we introduce the latter, it will be important for you to gain an understanding of the former, since it serves as the foundation for the study of global leadership.⁴

Table 1.1 The traditional leadership literature

The traditional literature can be divided into five distinct periods (Table 1.1).⁵ In the late 19th century, scholarly studies mainly focused on the traits of leaders. This Trait Approach primarily associated the characteristics of leaders with leadership. Through the study of biographies and the records of positional leaders (those with titles and offices associated with power and authority), scholars hoped to uncover the traits that led to great leadership.⁶ By the mid-1930s, it became increasingly obvious that scholars could not agree on the ideal list of traits that leaders should aspire to develop. The literature, in turn, shifted its focus to the behavior of leaders (leadership styles) – the way they interacted with their followers.⁷ Under this conception, followers began to be highlighted as a component of leadership, although scholarship remained leader-centric. Followers were only important to the extent that they had to be motivated to achieve leader-centered goals.

By the 1960s, scholars began to take into account the importance of context – the Contingency/Situational Approach – in shaping the leader’s behavior.⁸ This realization that leadership did not take place in a vacuum was a major advancement in the traditional leadership literature because it allowed scholars to explore contexts that warranted different leadership styles. This focus on context, however, was largely at the organizational level. Scholars primarily looked at the way organizational structures influenced how leaders treated their followers.

The second half of the 20th century brought about many changes in the traditional literature. The leader-centric model gave way to a wide variety of perspectives on the relationship between leaders and followers. James MacGregor Burns, for instance, in the 1970s grouped this relationship into three possible styles – power-wielding, transactional, and transforming leadership.⁹ He associated power-wielding with “pseudo-leadership” – the use of what he called “naked power” to coerce others to follow. From his perspective, this use of power did not produce a genuine relationship between leaders and followers. Transactional leadership allowed the two sides to engage in a short-lived relationship through the exchange of valued interests – e.g., as in the case of democratic politics with political leaders and their constituencies. Burns, however, did not consider transactional leadership as the ideal form. That was to be found in transforming leadership, under which both leaders and followers engaged in a long-term, meaningful relationship that took into consideration both the values and aspirations of both leaders and followers. In other words, the relationship transformed both sides.

This conceptualization of leadership as involving change also became the basis for the academic split between leadership and management as separate scholarly areas. Warren Bennis provided a powerful argument that management dealt with the status quo, while leadership was about change.¹⁰ The debate between management and leadership is far from settled. Initially, a value judgment seemed to be suggested – that somehow leadership was superior to management in its depth and scope. However, the more recent literature recognizes that the two sides are needed within organizations.

By the end of the 20th century, there were too many new theories and concepts in the traditional leadership literature to cover in a single section of a chapter. This explosion of theorizing encompassed all areas – from a leader-centric focus (e.g., Bill George’s Authentic Leadership) all the way to a more follower-centric approach (e.g., Ira Chalef’s Followership Model). To use a biological metaphor, the empirical study of leadership evolved from a “single cell” (its focus on the leader – the Trait Approach) to a multidimensional perspective – taking into consideration the followers, the goals, and the context of the leader–follower relationship. The last stage in this evolutionary process was the inclusion of the global context (the fifth period in the traditional leadership literature), a topic that we turn to in the next section.

Leadership “goes global”

The fact that leadership “went global” in the second half of the 20th century should not surprise us. Historical processes influenced this new focus on global perspectives. First, after World War II, the United States emerged as a military superpower, which forced the country to reevaluate its traditional isolationism.¹¹ The United States used to view foreign conflicts as temporary undertakings. Once conflicts were over, the country would pragmatically turn inward and focus on its domestic needs. The advent of the Cold War in the 1950s forced the United States to abandon these past practices and assume the military strategy of containment and international engagement. This shift in strategy had a monumental impact on our perception of leadership. The United States began to see itself as a “world leader” – the guarantor of global stability (Pax Americana).¹²

Second, the United States also emerged as an economic superpower ...