GLOBE: A twenty year journey into the intriguing world of culture and leadership

Since its inception in the early 1990s, the Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness (GLOBE) project has investigated the complex relationship between societal culture and organizational behavior. The focus of this paper is on leadership, specifically what we know and have learned...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of world business : JWB 2012-10, Vol.47 (4), p.504-518
Main Authors: Dorfman, Peter, Javidan, Mansour, Hanges, Paul, Dastmalchian, Ali, House, Robert
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Africa
Cluster analysis
Collectivism
Cross-cultural
Cultural values
Culture
Executive leadership
Experimental methods
GLOBE
In-group
International comparisons
Leadership
Management styles
Middle East
Multinational
North Africa
Organizational behaviour
Studies
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Since its inception in the early 1990s, the Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness (GLOBE) project has investigated the complex relationship between societal culture and organizational behavior. The focus of this paper is on leadership, specifically what we know and have learned from the GLOBE project so far. Among other findings, we demonstrate that national culture indirectly influences leadership behaviors through the leadership expectations of societies. In other words, executives tend to lead in a manner more or less consistent with the leadership prototypes endorsed within their particular culture. In turn, leaders who behave according to expectations are most effective. We also found that some leadership behaviors are universally effective such as charismatic/value-based leadership; others are much more culturally sensitive such as participative leadership. Finally, we identified truly superior (and also truly inferior) CEOs by the degree to which their behaviors exceed (or fail to meet) their society's expectations. All in all, understanding national culture gives us a heads-up as to which kinds of leadership will likely be enacted and effective in each society. We believe that the GLOBE journey has helped us understand the complex, tricky, and fascinating relationships among societal culture, organizational behavior, and leadership processes.
ISSN:1090-9516
1878-5573
DOI:10.1016/j.jwb.2012.01.004