Researcher Robert J. House and a team of 160 scholars have produced a comprehensive study of the common and distinctive elements of organizational leadership around the world. In his co-edited Culture, Leadership, and Organizations: The GLOBE Study of 62 Societies, House and colleagues Paul J. Hanges, Mansour Javidan, Peter W. Dorfman, Vipin Gupta, and others report the results of their survey of 17,370 managers working in 951 companies in the banking, food processing, and telecommunications sectors. They also compiled information on cultures of the 62 nations surveyed (including Albania, Ireland, the U.S., and Zimbabwe), and they theorized that what would be valued among leaders in each of these countries would depend much on their national cultures.
House’s team finds that four leadership attributes are valued universally; they are considered important for organizational leadership in all countries:
1. Being trustworthy, just, and honest.
2. Seeing and planning ahead
3. Being optimistic, dynamic, and inspiring
4. Communicating, informing, and coordinating others
House and his team also report that several attributes are universally disliked in leaders, including being irritable, egocentric, and autocratic.
But still other qualities are extolled as leadership virtues in some societies but less so in other, and much of that variation can be traced to the societal cultures in which the organizations operated. Countries whose cultures place a premium on performance, for instance, are those in which inspirational and decisive leadership is valued; countries whose cultures stress group identity and minimizing uncertainty are those where diplomatic and collaborative leadership is valued. [Wharton Leadership Digest Annotation]
Authors: Mansour Javidan, Paul J Hanges, Peter W. Dorfman, Robert J. House, Vipin Gupta
Subjects: International, Leadership
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