Leadership and Cultural Context: A Theoretical and Empirical Examination Based on Project GLOBE

By: Jon Paul Howell and Mansour Javidan and Peter W. Dorfman and Paul J. Hanges

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Synopsis: Leadership today involves fewer and fewer borders as global corporations fashion their strategies around integrating production and delivering value worldwide. Transforming a global organization to a global network of interconnected and integrated operations is no easy task. From a leadership perspective, it requires the ability to work with and influence individuals of diverse cultural backgrounds, both inside and outside the corporation, to help achieve corporate goals. In this chapter, the authors raise crucial issues about the nature and dynamics of leadership in a cross-cultural environment. The foundation of their approach is the notion that organizations and societies have implicit leadership theories, with distinct beliefs about the attributes that define effective leadership. These beliefs, in turn, shape individuals' perceptions about who is and who is not a leader. Taking an integrative and multilevel approach, the authors examine the impact of both national culture and organizational culture on implicit leadership attributes. They present a series of hypotheses on the relationship between specific cultural dimensions and specific leadership attributes, using the worldwide GLOBE database of outstanding leadership dimensions to test these hypotheses and present their conclusions. This chapter was originally published as Chapter 13 of "Handbook of Leadership Theory and Practice: A Harvard Business School Centennial Colloquium."