Advances in Global Leadership

Joyce S. Osland, Mark E. Mendenhall, Ming Li, Joyce S. Osland, Mark E. Mendenhall, Ming Li

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781787146990
• eBook ISBN: 9781787430105
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

Volume 10 of Advances in Global Leadership continues to advance both global leadership research and practice by bridging and integrating conceptual and practitioner perspectives to provide a deeper understanding of this rapidly growing field of study. This volume contains both innovative foundational research on global leadership processes and new models to advance theoretical work. The 'Practitioner's Corner' section of the volume contains lessons from three experts with decades of experience in developing global leaders from both business and non-profits. This volume also provides detailed descriptions of ground-breaking university global leadership development programs. As always, the editors conclude the volume with an overview of the current state of the field and a summary of the key research needs and directions to guide future scholarship.

PART I
EMPIRICAL FINDINGS AND THEORETICAL PROPOSITIONS

THE NATURE OF GLOBAL LEADERS’ WORK

Tina Huesing and James D. Ludema

ABSTRACT

Despite the need for effective global leaders on the part of business (McKinsey, 2012) and the growing body of empirical research related to the topic of global leadership (Osland, 2013a), very little is known about what global leaders actually do. How do they spend their time? In what kinds of activities are they involved? How do they communicate, coordinate, make decisions, and lead? How is their work similar to or different from that of domestic leaders? In this chapter, we respond to these questions by exploring the nature of global leaders’ work using an approach similar to Mintzberg (1973) in his classic book, The Nature of Managerial Work. We observed five global leaders from five different industries, each for 1 week, and compared our results with Mintzberg’s (1973). In addition, we conducted informal interviews and collected archival data. We content-analyzed the data using the conventions of grounded theory and identified 10 distinguishing characteristics of global leaders’ work. It is characterized by (1) multiple time zones and geographical distance; (2) long hours; (3) flexible schedules and fluid time; (4) dependence on technology; (5) time alone connected to others; (6) extensive travel; (7) functional expertise with global scope; (8) facilitation of information, advice, and action; (9) management of complexity; and (10) confrontation of risk. We conclude by discussing implications for future global leadership research.

Keywords: Global leadership; work studies; global tasks; semi-structured observation

INTRODUCTION

This chapter was inspired in part by Mintzberg’s (1973) book, The Nature of Managerial Work, which is often cited as seminal research in the fields of leadership and work studies (Tengblad, 2006). Mintzberg observed five chief executives of large corporations each for a week. All five lived and worked in the United States and led domestic organizations. Mintzberg’s (1973) purpose was to understand (1) the job of the manager rather than the man, (2) the similarities in managers’ work rather than the differences, and (3) the essential content of managerial work rather than its peripheral characteristics (p. 230). Over the last 40 plus years, his findings, combined with a vast body of research that built on his work, has helped to establish and develop the field of management science and connect it closely to what managers actually do.

Despite the influence of Mintzberg’s (1973) research and the need to develop more global leaders (McKinsey, 2012), to-date no one has conducted a similar study in the field of global leadership. Osland (2013a) writes, “No one has replicated Mintzberg’s (1973) landmark observation of managerial behavior with global leaders by following them around as they do their work” (p. 76). Similarly, Bird and Stevens (2013) suggest that for global leadership research to proceed, more work is needed “a little closer to the ground” (p. 140). This chapter answers the call to observe global leaders in action and discover what they actually do. We observed five global leaders, each for 5 days, conducted informal interviews with them and their colleagues, and collected archival data about the leaders and their companies to assess the nature of their work.

Except for one participant who founded his own global company, the executives we observed were heads of different functions (human resources, finance, global sales, and global services) in large global firms. They all were responsible for business results that crossed geographic boundaries and were successful in influencing others to pursue a common goal. As such, they fit Reiche, Bird, Mendenhall, and Osland’s (2017) definition of a global leader as an individual who inspires and influences a range of internal and external constituents from multiple national cultures and jurisdictions to willingly pursue a common goal in a context characterized by significant levels of task and relationship complexity.

REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE

In this section, we set the stage for our study first by reviewing the literature on management and work behavior (Tengblad, 2012), most of which has been done in the domestic context. We then touch briefly on relevant research from the fields of intercultural studies, intercultural communication, international human resource management, and global leadership competencies, development, and assessment. We conclude with an exploration of the literature on the scope of global leadership tasks, which is closest to our focus on the nature of global leaders’ work.

Pre-Mintzberg’s Work Studies (1950–1973)

Chester Barnard’s (1968) The Functions of the Executive, originally published in 1938, is one of the best-known early reports by an executive looking at the work of executives. He identified the maintenance of a formal organization and the communication system for the organization as the two primary functions of an executive: “Executive work is not that of the organization, but the specialized work of maintaining the organization in operation” [italics in the original] (Barnard, 1968, p. 215). Executives function as “points of interconnection” within the system, serving as essential hubs of communication and coordination. Barnard (1968) also pointed out that much of the work executives do is not executive work per se; they often engage in production work, drawing on their technical background or functional expertise.

In 1951, Sune Carlson (1991) published a landmark study of nine managing directors (CEOs) of Swedish companies who kept a diary of their daily work for 4 weeks. They detailed where, when, and with whom they worked, and their administrative assistants kept a record of incoming and outgoing mail and telephone calls. Carlson (1991) concluded that the main tasks of an executive are to make decisions or to see to it that decisions are made by others, and to ensure that these decisions are carried out by members of the organization. Like Barnard (1968), he claimed that executives accomplish these tasks primarily through communication and coordination. He wrote that he “always thought of a chief executive as the conductor of an orchestra,” but after seeing how much time and energy an executive spends on communicating and coordinating with a wide range of constituencies, he was more inclined to “see him as the puppet in a puppet-show with hundreds of people pulling the strings and forcing him to act in one way or another” (Carlson, 1991, p. 46).

Dalton (1959) agreed with Barnard and Carlson that an executive’s job consists mostly of communication and coordination but showed how cliques and collusion between senior managers and older workers influenced action through informal networks. He claimed that these informal networks were useful for facilitating fluid communication, decision-making, and action, but often excluded important constituencies and added complexity and stress by blurring the lines between executives’ private lives and their work lives.

Mintzberg (1973)

In 1937, Gulick wrote, “What is the work of the chief executive? What does he do? The answer is POSDCORB” (p. 13). He created the acronym to call attention to the various activities of a chief executive: planning, organizing, staffing, directing, coordinating, reporting, and budgeting. Gulick (1937) was building on Fayol’s 1916 work, which introduced the five basic managerial functions as: planning, organizing, coordinating, commanding, and controlling.

Rather than focusing on activities like POSDCORB, Mintzberg (1973) grouped the work of executives into 10 roles and then clustered them into three main categories: interpersonal roles (figurehead, leader, liaison); informational roles (monitor, disseminator, spokesperson); and decisional roles (entrepreneur, disturbance handler, resource allocator, negotiator). These roles are similar to the functions of communication and coordination identified by Barnard (1968), Carlson (1991), and Dalton (1959) but add ceremonial roles such as spokesperson and figurehead that, according to Mintzberg (1973), take up to a third of an executive’s time.

Mintzberg (1973) also outlined 13 propositions that describe the dynamism and complexity of managerial work: the work is open-ended, there is little free time, activities are fragmented, interruptions are commonplace, there is always something else that needs to be done, there is a danger of superficiality, current information is preferred over routine reports, nonroutine activities get most attention, verbal communication is preferred over written, managers generate much less written communication than they receive, managers are the link between the organization and outside contacts, managers spend little time (less than 10%) with their superiors, and managers are responsible for many initial commitments.

In summary, Mintzberg (1973) agreed with Barnard (1968), Carlson (1991), and Dalton (1959) that the primary roles of an executive are to communicate and coordinate with a wide range of internal and external constituencies to maintain the organization and get work done. He added that executives invest significant time in ceremonial roles such as spokesperson and figurehead. Additionally, he showed that the work of an executive is complex and dynamic, filled with high levels of novelty, uncertainty, ambiguity, and fragmentation.

Post-Mintzberg Studies (1973–2016)

Mintzberg’s (1973) study was replicated by Kurke and Aldrich (1983), who confirmed his results, reinforcing the image of managers as focusing primarily on communicating, coordinating, and networking in a setting characterized by fragmentation, brevity, concentration on live media, and dependence on others. Similarly, Kotter (1982) observed 15 general managers from nine corporations in the United States and showed how they carried out their roles of communication and coordination through networks of stakeholders. They relied on their networks to decide what to focus on, depended on the network to get things done, influenced the network to move in desired directions, and did all of this while keeping in mind what the people in their network wanted (attention to their needs and shared direction). In addition, Kotter (1982) described how, in a context of increasing turbulence and complexity, leading change was increasingly becoming a central part of the job of managers at all levels.

Luthans, Hodgetts, and Rosenkrantz (1988) studied 248 American managers and identified 12 descriptive categories that they grouped into four main activities: communication, traditional management, networking, and human resource management, all similar to previous research with the important addition of human resource management. They discovered two different groups of managers: managers who were promoted quickly (“successful” managers) and managers whose performance was rated as superior (“effective” managers). Interestingly, successful managers spent more time socializing, whereas effective managers spent the bulk of their time on communication and human resource management activities.

In 2013, Mintzberg revisited the question of the nature of managerial work in his book Simply Managing and spent a day each with 29 leaders around the world. He argued that many of his previous findings still hold but that the complexity of the work environment and pace of change have increased dramatically with the growth of the global economy, increase in global travel, and emergence of ubiquitous electronic communication. He concluded that interpersonal, informational, and decisional roles are still essential but that “management is neither a science nor a profession,” but a practice, and “managers are only as good as their ability to work things out thoughtfully in their own way” (Mintzberg, 2013, pp. 8, 12).

In summary, Mintzberg (1973) set out to understand (1) the job of the manager rather than the man, (2) the similarities in managers’ work rather than the differences, and (3) the essential content of managerial work rather than its peripheral characteristics. He discovered that the job of a manager is to serve as figurehead, leader, and liaison (interpersonal roles); monit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Part I Empirical Findings and Theoretical Propositions
• Part II The Practitioner’s Corner
• Conclusion