Free Essay with an Article Summary about Project GLOBE

Global leadership is viewed as one of the contributing factors to multinational corporations. The issue is mostly discussed on an insignificant scale. That is, either as general advice or as limited research based on data collected from a single country. This article provides a way to lead in a foreign country by using a broad-based case study that involves several countries on the issue of global leadership. To achieve this, an American Executive with similar teams in France, Brazil, China, and Egypt is used as a hypothetical case. Based on the interaction with employees from different cultural backgrounds, the paper contains a discussion of various challenges faced by global executives as well as provides global leadership solutions.

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People's national culture has a great influence in the way they view the world; it is, therefore, important to appreciate the fact that globalization has changed people perspectives as it leads to cross-cultural interaction with employees, suppliers, customers, creditors, and competitors. For instance, managers can successfully be contributors to the global corporation if they compare their national cultures to those of the other countries to achieve global conceptualization. The nine culture dimensions in globalization include performance orientations, assertiveness, future orientation, humane orientation, institutional collectivism, in-group collectivism, gender egalitarianism, power distance, and uncertainty avoidance. GLOBE did a regional clustering of the world into ten clusters after merging 62 culture samples. The clusters included Eastern Europe, Southern Asia, Confucian Asia, the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, Nordic Europe, Latin America, Latin Europe, Germanic Europe, and Anglo.

What makes expectations from leaders differ from one nation to another is the assumptions by citizens on some leadership qualities. According to ILT, which is an extension of GLOBE, the content and structure of common belief systems around the world are referred to as analog of individual implicit. Some of the universally perceived attributes of leadership include charismatic, team-oriented, participative, human-oriented, autonomous, and self-protective. Cultural leadership is not only about the observation of the differences, but also the similarities among the various cultures. Leaders should understand some of the culturally contingent leadership attributes. The five countries where American Exertive spread its branches gives an opportunity of studying the differences in the cultures, the effects of the cultural differences and how leadership can be used to addressing the differences.

The available literature on cross-cultural management is more beneficial when it comes to the conceptual level of leadership than it is beneficial regarding behavioral level. The paper presents the cultural profiles of five countries based on exhaustive scientific research; the research shows that people from different cultures hold, exaggerated, false, or unstated stereotypes about people from other cultures. The attributes of global leaders include the ability to influence people regardless of cultural differences as well as the differences in beliefs.

A bigger percentage of Fortune 500 Corporation acknowledges and reports the shortage of global leadership. The development of programs that encourage global mindset among leaders is one of the challenges faced by global leadership today. Companies can enhance a pool of global leaders by training on a large volume of information regarding global and cross-cultural issues. Leaders should be encouraged to read human resource management journals as well as make the use of various software packages such as "bridging culture" for individual training, especially for those who will be working in other countries and interacting with different cultures.

Reference

Javidan, M., Dorfman, P., de Luque, M., & House, R. (2006). In the Eye of the Beholder: Cross-Cultural Lessons in Leadership from Project GLOBE. Academy Of Management Perspectives, 20(1), 67-90. doi: 10.5465/amp.2006.19873410