Introduction
Culture and leadership are probably among the most written about and the least understood topics in the social sciences. This is not only because social scientists find these two topics very challenging, even seductive, but also because these two seem necessary for satisfying human existence. The Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness (GLOBE) Research Project has studied these popular topics afresh and in a simultaneous breadth and depth that has never before been attempted. The comprehensive quantitative findings of all the 61 countries studied are described in an earlier volume (House, Hanges, Javidan, Dorfman, Gupta, & GLOBE Associates, 2004). This book reports the results of the in-depth analyses of culture and leadership in 25 of the 61 countries, each of which is presented by scholars and researchers from those countries, who integrated the quantitative and qualitative GLOBE findings.
This book is addressed to both university teachers and researchers on the one side and practicing managers on the other side. For the former, it provides in-depth understanding of 25 cultures from multiple perspectives and suggestions for further research in each of these cultures. Reading all the chapters, together with the last chapter of this volume (“Integration, Conclusions, and Future Directions”), will provide a detailed understanding of the similarities and differences of cultural and leadership practices and values in a broad range of countries across major regions of the world. For the latter, for example, managers who are planning to work, or who are already working, in cross-cultural environments (which we believe, more and more managers will have to do in the coming years) will find each country chapter to be a source for developing a thorough understanding of the culture and leadership practices of that country. In addition, they will find practical suggestions, based on rigorous research and experience rooted in that country, about how to deal with managers of and situations in that country. Information contained in this book will also be a valuable resource for senior managers planning to do business with other countries or to set up offices or operations in other countries. Taken together, the comparative study of 61 countries presented in House et al. (2004) and the in-depth reports about each of a sample of 25 countries from the present book, constitute a rich source of information for anyone interested in understanding the culture and leadership of countries and organizations across the world.
This chapter starts by explaining the need for country-specific understanding of culture and leadership, goes on to define the constructs used in the research, and is followed by an overview of the history and a description of the GLOBE project. The general structure of country chapters is then described, followed by the plan of the book itself. It closes with a brief comment on the unique contribution the content of this book makes to the domain.
1. COUNTRY-SPECIFIC UNDERSTANDING
This book focuses on detailed and specific understanding of culture and leadership in the 25 countries represented here. Although there is a need for theories about leadership and organization that transcend cultural boundaries because the goal of science is to discover and construct universally valid theories, laws, and principles, there are however inherent limitations in transferring theories across widely varying cultures. What works in one culture may not work in another culture. As Triandis (1993) suggests, leadership researchers will be able to “fine-tune” theories by investigating cultural variations as parameters of those theories. In addition, a focus on cross-cultural issues can help researchers discover new relationships by suggesting that investigators include a much more encompassing range of variables usually not considered in contemporary theories, such as the prominence of religion, language, ethnicity, history, and political systems (Dorfman, 1996).
Although the quantitative data of the GLOBE research program allow comparisons and contrasts among cultures, they do not allow for culture-specific descriptions of the societies studied. That is why the authors of the 25 country chapters represented here have described selected culture-specific attributes and entities of the national setting in which the middle-management informants are embedded. The attributes and entities are those that the authors have judged as having nontrivial influences on the interpretation and practice of leadership and organizational practices of the cultures studied. Although the authors were given a suggested overall structure for country chapters, they were also free to decide how best to present the specific information pertaining to the country about which they were writing. On the one hand, this gave them the freedom to deviate from the set structure in order to represent cultural and leadership peculiarities more adequately. On the other side, this freedom resulted in chapters where the structure and presentation style differs to some extent. The structure suggested to the authors and that has generally been followed in several, but not all, chapters is described in a later section of this chapter.
2. DEFINITIONS OF CONSTRUCTS
The three major constructs of interest in GLOBE are culture, organizational practices and values, and leadership. Definitions of these, as used in GLOBE, are given in the next subsections, along with those of the dimensions that form or contribute to these constructs. These are described here in this chapter to avoid the need for repeatedly defining them in every country chapter. It is recommended that readers refer to this section as they come across these constructs in the country chapters.
There is no universally agreed-upon definition of culture among social scientists. Social scientists generally use the term to refer to a set of parameters of collectivities that differentiate the collectivities from each other in meaningful ways. The focus is on the “sharedness” of cultural indicators among members of the collectivity. The specific criteria used to differentiate cultures usually depend on the preferences of the investigator and the issues under investigation, and tend to reflect the discipline of the investigator. It was also decided to develop a GLOBE definition of culture.
In August 1994, the first GLOBE research conference was held at the University of Calgary in Canada. The participants consisted of 54 researchers from 38 countries. They met to develop a collective understanding of the project and to initiate its implementation. Time was spent generating definitions of leadership that reflected the diverse viewpoints held by GLOBE researchers; time was also spent defining and describing culture. Culture was defined as “shared motives, values, beliefs, identities, and interpretations or meanings of significant events that result from common experiences of members of collectives and are transmitted across age generations” (House & Javidan, 2004, p. 15). It is worth noting that these are psychological attributes and that the definition can be applied at both the societal and organizational levels of analysis.
GLOBE Dimensions of Societal Culture. Culture, being one of the major phenomena of interest in GLOBE, was operationalized at multiple levels. First, cultures were operationalized in terms of quantitative dimensions: (a) Assertiveness, (b) Future Orientation, (c) Gender Egalitarianism, (d) Humane Orientation, (e) Institutional Collectivism (Collectivism I), (f) In-Group Collectivism (Collectivism II), (g) Performance Orientation, (h) Power Distance, and (i) Uncertainty Avoidance. These dimensions were selected on the basis of a review of the literature relevant to the measurement of culture in prior large-sample studies and on the basis of existing cross-culture theory, such as the works of Hofstede (1980), Hofstede and Bond (1988), Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck (1961), McClelland (1961, 1985), and Putman (1993) among others. The definitions of these dimensions adopted by GLOBE are as follows:
1. Assertiveness is the degree to which individuals in organizations or societies are assertive, confrontational, and aggressive in social relationships.
2. Future Orientation is the degree to which individuals in organizations or societies engage in future-oriented behaviors such as planning, investing in the future, and delaying individual or collective gratification.
3. Gender Egalitarianism is the extent to which an organization or a society minimizes gender role differences while promoting gender equity and the equality of genders.
4. Humane Orientation is the degree to which individuals in organizations or societies encourage and reward individuals for being fair, altruistic, friendly, generous, caring, kind to others, and exhibiting and promoting altruistic ideals.
5. Institutional Collectivism (Collectivism I) reflects the degree to which organizational and societal institutional practices encourage and reward collective distribution of resources and collective action.
6. In-Group Collectivism (Collectivism II) reflects the degree to which individuals express pride, loyalty, and cohesiveness in their organizations, families, circle of close friends, or other such small groups.
7. Performance Orientation refers to the extent to which high level members of organizations and societies encourage and reward group members for performance improvement and excellence.
8. Power Distance is the degree to which members of an organization and society encourage and reward unequal distribution of power with greater power at higher levels.
9. Uncertainty Avoidance is the extent to which members of an organization or society strive to avoid uncertainty by relying on established social norms, rituals, and bureaucratic practices to decrease the probability of unpredictable future events that could adversely affect the operation of an organization or society, and also to remedy the potential adverse effects of such unpredictable future events.
Six of the culture dimensions had their origins in the dimensions of culture identified by Hofstede (1980). Power Distance and Uncertainty Avoidance reflect the same constructs as Hofstede's dimensions labeled Power Distance and Uncertainty Avoidance. Collectivism has been broken into two dimensions: the Institutional Collectivism (Collectivism I) dimension measures societal emphasis on collectivism, with low scores reflecting individualistic emphasis and high scores reflecting collectivistic emphasis; and the In-Group Collectivism (Collectivism II) scale measures pride in and loyalty to smaller groups such as family, organization, circle of close friends, and organizational cohesiveness. In lieu of Hofstede's Masculinity dimension, it was decided to develop two dimensions labeled Gender Egalitarianism and Assertiveness, because these attributes are stressed in Hofstede's discussion of his Masculinity dimension. These two dimensions represent the theoretical construct of masculinity better, and avoid the confusion and interpretation difficulties of Hofstede's measure. Future Orientation is derived from Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck's (1961) Past, Present, Future Orientation dimension, which focuses on the temporal mode of a society. Performance Orientation was derived from McClelland's work on need for achievement (McClelland, 1961, 1985).
Humane Orientation has its roots in Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck's (1961) work on the Human Nature Is Good vs. Human Nature Is Bad dimension, as well as Putnam's (1993) work on the Civic Society, and McClelland's (1985) conceptualization of the affiliative motive.
Culture “As Is” and Culture “Should Be.” Culture is often manifested in two distinct ways. The first is as values, beliefs, schemas, and implicit theories commonly held among members of a collectivity (society or organization), and these are variously called the attributes of culture. Culture is also commonly observed and reported as practices of entities such as families, schools, work organizations, economic and legal systems, political institutions, and the like. The GLOBE program measured all of the nine dimensions of culture in both these manifestations. The former are expressed as response to questionnaire items in the form of judgments of what should be, and the latter as assessments of what is with regard to common behaviors, institutional practices, prescriptions, and proscriptions.
Societal and Organizational Culture. The third and final level of operationalization focused on the unit of analysis. Because the GLOBE project was designed to assess the impact of societal culture and organizational culture on perceptions of effective leadership, society and organizations within society were considered as separate units of analysis. Therefore, culture has been measured in GLOBE at both these levels.
The preceding approach to culture is illustrated in Fig. 1.1.
The intention with the design of Fig. 1.1 was to take into account varying perspectives on culture and its measurement. McClelland (1985) distinguished between the implicit (unconscious) and explicit (conscious) motives. Implicit motives reflect learned emotional and pleasurable association with a select set of stimuli as well as possible genetic disposition. Explicit motives reflect conscious values. Because the GLOBE societal culture dimensions are based on questionnaire responses, at the individual level they are likely to reflect explicit values and motives. When aggregated to the level of the society or organization, the aggregated scores reflect norms of society, which serve to motivate, direct, and constrain behavior of members of cultures. In this manner, aggregated implicit questionnaire responses may reflect powerful incentives, much like implicit motives. The fact that they measured cultural practices (“As Is” measures), and these practices correlated quite highly (>0.60) with unobtrusive measures suggests that aggregated individual responses are analogous to individual implicit motives, at the organizational and societal levels of analysis (Hanges & Dickson, 2004, in press).
Figure 1.1 GLOBE's multilevel approach to measuring culture
Leadership
Leadership has been a topic of study for social scientists for much of the 20th century (Yukl, 2006), yet there is no universally agreed-upon definition of leadership (Bass, 1990). A large number of definitions have been advanced by scholars. The core concept of almost all such definitions concerns influence—leaders influence others to help accomplish group or organizational objectives. The variety of definitions is appropriate, as the degree of specificity of the definition of leadership should be driven by the intentions of the research. Smith and Bond (1993) specifically note: “If we wish to make statements about universal or etic aspects of social behavior, they need to be phrased in highly abstract ways. Conversely, if we wish to highlight the meaning of these generalizations in specific or emic ways, then we need to refer to more precisely specified events or behaviors” (p. 58). The GLOBE goals are concerned with both aspects of leadership and organizational practices that are comparable across cultures and culture-specific differences in leadership and organizational practices and their effectiveness. It was clear in the Calgary meeting that the evaluative and semantic interpretation of the term leadership, and the ways in which leadership and organizational processes are enacted, vary across cultures, and that some aspects of leadership are universally valid.
The commonly agreed-upon definition of organizational leadership that emerged at the Calgary meeting and that was adopted by GLOBE is “the ability of an individual to influence, motivate, and enable others to contribute toward the effectiveness and success of the organizations of which they are members” (House & Javidan, 2004, p. 15). The focus was on organizational leadership, not leadership in general. Simonton (1994), speaking of leadership in general, defines a leader as a “group member whose influence on group attitudes, performance, or decision making greatly exceeds that of the average member of the group” (p. 411). Project GLOBE concerns the phenomenon of organizational leadership and not leadership in general.
3. BACKGROUND OF THE GLOBE RESEARCH PROJECT
GLOBE as a research program concerned with leadership, organizational practices, and national culture was conceived in the summer of 1991 and initially designed by the third editor of this book as the Principal Investigator. He was later joined by Michael Agar, Marcus Dickson, Paul Hanges, and S. Antonio Ruiz-Quintanilla as Co-Principal Investigators. In the spring of 1993, a grant proposal was written that followed a substantial literature review and development of a pool of 753 questionnaire items. GLOBE was funded in October 1993. Because cross-cultural research requires substantially detailed knowledge of all the cultures being studied, a network of approximately 175 Country Co-Investigators (CCIs) was developed. These are social scientists or management researchers and scholars from the 61 participating countries.
The CCIs, recruited through an extending network of personal contacts and referrals, were responsible for leadership of the project in a specific culture in which they had expertise. Their activities included collecting quantitative and qualitative data, ensuring the accuracy of questionnaire translations, writing country-specific descriptions of their cultures in which they interpreted the results of the quantitative data analyses in their own cultural context, and contributing insights from their unique cultural perspectives to the ongoing GLOBE research. In most cases, CCIs are natives of the cultures from which they were to collect data, and they also resided in those specific cultures. Some of the CCIs are people with extensive experience in more than one culture. Most cultures have a research team of between two and five CCIs working on the project. An initial goal of Project GLOBE was to develop societal and organizational measures of culture and leader attributes that would be appropriate to employ across all cultures. The CCIs played a critical role in enhancing the generalizability of the GLOBE instruments, and also in their development. The major criterion for the selection of GLOBE members was that they were active researchers concerned with cross-cultural issues, leadership, and organizational functioning. The CCIs, together with the Principal Investigators and Research Associates, comprise the members of the GLOBE community. The activities of the project as a whole are coordinated by the GLOBE Coordinating Team (GCT), which was founded in 1996. Its members—in addition to the principal investigators named earlier who were also part of the GCT—reflect a multinational body of scholars (in alphabetical order): Staffan Akerblom (Sweden), Felix C. Brodbeck (Germany at the time, now United Kingdom), Jagdeep S. Chhokar (India), Peter W. Dorfman (United States), Mansour Javidan (Canada at the time, now United States), Enrique Ogliastri (Colombia), Antonio-Ruiz Quintanilla (United States), and Marius van Wyk (South Africa).1 The GCT has been responsible for designing quantitative measures and qualitative methods, performing cross-cultural statistical analyses, and coordinating efforts to present results of the project to the scholarly community.
Figure 1.2 Theoretical model of GLOBE
GLOBE has been a multiphase, multimethod, multicountry project in which researchers spanning the world examined the interrelationships between societal culture, organizational culture, and organizational leadership. Table 1.1 lists the countries that are part of the GLOBE research. The list includes at least three countries in each of the following geographic regions that are represented in the GLOBE sample: Africa, Asia, Europe (Eastern, Central, and Northern), Latin America, North America, North Africa, the Middle East, and the Pacific Rim. The 25 countries covered in the present book are marked with an asterisk.
4. THE GLOBE RESEARCH PROJECT
The GLOBE Research Project investigated the relationships between societal cultures, organizational cultures, and leadership practices in the participating countries, as well as numerous indicators of the economic competitiveness of the societies studied and the psychological well-being of their members (for details, see Javidan & Hauser, 2004). The independent variables were nine attributes of culture, identified during the program, which when quantified are referred to as core cultural dimensions (for details, see Gupta, de Luque, & House, 2004; Hanges & Dickson, 2004). An overall model guiding the program is shown in Fig. 1.2.
The core of Fig. 1.2 is the relationship between societal culture, norms, and practices, with organizational form, culture, and practices as well as with leadership. Societal culture both affects the other core concepts, and also influences the economic performance of societies, the physical and psychological well-being of the members of societies, and the culturally endorsed implicit leadership theories. Strategic contingencies of organizations also affect organizational form, culture, and practices; leader behavior and attributes; and leader effectiveness.
TABLE 1.1
List of Countries participating in the GLOBE Research Program
| Albania | *Hong Kong | Qatar |
| *Argentina | Hungary | |
| *Australia | *Russian Federation | |
| *Austria | *India | |
| Indonesia | *Singapore | |
| Bolivia | @Iran | Slovenia |
| Brazil | *Ireland | South Africa (Black sample) |
| Israel | *South Africa (While sample) | |
| Canada (English speaking) | Italy | *Spain |
| *China | *Sweden | |
| *Colombia | Japan | *Switzerland |
| Costa Rica | ||
| @Czech Republic | Kazakhstan | Taiwan |
| Korea, Republic of (South) | Thailand | |
| Denmark | Kuwait | *Turkey |
| Ecuador | Malaysia | *United States of America |
| Egypt, Arab Republic of | *Mexico | |
| *England | Morocco | Venezuela |
| El Salvador | ||
| Namibia | Zambia | |
| *Finland | *Netherlands | Zimbabwe |
| *France | *New Zealand Nicaragua | |
| Georgia | Nigeria | |
| Germany (Former East) | ||
| *Germany (Former West) | Philippines | |
| *Greece | Poland | |
| Guatemala | *Portugal |
*Countries represented in this book.
@Due to special data-collection issues with the data from Iran and the Czech Republic, one or both of these countries could not be included in some of the comparative analyses. This is why in some of the country chapters in this book the total number of countries is shown as 61.
Globe Objectives
The meta-goal of GLOBE is to develop an empirically based theory to describe, understand, and predict the impact of specific cultural variables on leadership and organizational processes and the effectiveness of these processes. Specific objectives include answering the following fundamental questions:
• Are there leader behaviors, attributes, and organizational practices that are universally accepted and effective across cultures?
• Are there leader behaviors, attributes, and organizational practices that are accepted and effective in only some cultures?
• How do attributes of societal and organizational cultures influence the varieties of leader behaviors and organizational practices that are accepted and effective?
•••What is the effect of violating cultural norms relevant to leadership and organizational practices?
• What is the relative standing of each of the cultures studied on each of the nine core dimensions of culture?
• Can the universal and culture-specific aspects of leader behaviors, attributes, and organizational practices be explained in terms of an underlying theory that accounts for systematic differences across cultures?
The preceding questions are dealt with in detail and answered in the first GLOBE book (House et al., 2004). In the present book, each country chapter describes the country-specific leader behaviors and attributes and the societal cultural and organizational cultural practices and values. Moreover, for each country, its relative standing on each of these variables is reflected, on the one side, in relation to the worldwide distribution of country scores, and on the other side, in relation to what these actually mean in relation to the cultural background of the country, its history, its religions, its socioeconomical development, and further relevant characteristics.
Four Phases of GLOBE
To achieve the aforementioned objectives, the GLOBE research program was designed with four planned phases. The first phase consisted of two major tasks. The first task was the specification of a preliminary theory of causal processes and relationships among societal cultural dimensions and various other variables, to guide the research to be conducted. The second task of Phase 1 was the development and validation of questionnaires for data collection purposes as well as standardized guides for qualitative research to be conducted in the societies studied. The questionnaires developed in the second task of Phase 1 have sound psychometric properties such as high within-culture respondent agreement, high between-culture differences in aggregated means of individual responses, and high interitem consistency within scales. The generalizability coefficient (interclass correlation ICC-KK), which jointly measures the psychometric properties, exceeds 0.85 for all of the scales developed in this task (Hanges & Dickson, 2004, in press). Further details are described in Chapter 2 of this book.
The objectives of Phase 2 were to study the participating cultures on the nine core societal culture dimensions, and to test various hypotheses concerning relationships between the core societal culture dimensions on the one hand and dimensions of culturally endorsed implicit leadership theories, organizational cultures, and independently collected measures of the psychological, physical, and economic well-being of the members of the culture studied on the other.
In this phase, data were collected from approximately 17,300 managers in 951 organizations in 61 countries, and exhaustive statistical analyses were done. The results of Phase 2 are described in House et al. (2004).
In the third phase (currently under way), the impact and effectiveness of specific leader behaviors and styles of CEOs on subordinates’ attitudes and job performance, and on leader and organizational effectiveness to analyze the longitudinal effects of leadership and organizational practices and organizational form on organizational effectiveness is being investigated. A tentative fourth phase will employ field and laboratory experiments to confirm, establish causality, and extend previous findings.
Generalizability Across Cultures
The cross-cultural literature often struggles in dealing with culturally specific and culturally generalizable aspects. Culturally generalizable phenomena are experienced by all cultures to some extent. A phenomenon can be so categorized if all cultures can be assessed in terms of a common metric relating to the phenomenon. Cultures can be compared in terms of such phenomena. In contrast, culturally specific phenomena occur in only a subset of cultures. Each of the country chapters in this book describes and discusses, on the one side, the culturally generalizable phenomena by comparing the findings of that particular country with the 61 GLOBE countries and relevant subsets of countries, and on the other side, describes and discusses country-specific aspects in detail. Overall the objective of each country chapter is to integrate quantitative-comparative with qualitative-in-depth results about their country into a coherent picture.
The industries studied were food processing, financial services, and telecommunication service because these are provided within all nations. The more than 17,300 respondents were middle managers from more than 950 mainly domestic organizations in the respective industries. Thus, the sampling strategy for the collection of questionnaire data accounted for nation (from major cultural regions in the world, see Table 1.1) and industry (food, finance, telecom) and controlled for occupation (managers) and organizational level (middle management).
Sampling from middle managers permitted us to generalize the subcultures of middle managers in the three industries studied and the cultures studied. This sampling strategy increased the internal validity of the study by ensuring that the units of analysis were well defined and internally homogeneous. This is reinforced by the triangulation of the quantitative results with a variety of other world data sources (Gupta et al., 2004; Javidan & Hauser, 2004) and with the findings of the various qualitative methods followed (for details, see the next chapter, “Methodology”) in each country that is represented in this book. The correlation of the aggregate middle-managers responses with those of unobtrusive measures, which reflect the broader aspects of the society with respect to each dimension studied, indicate that the middle managers reflect the broader culture in which they are embedded rather than the culture of middle managers alone. Furthermore, cross-industry analysis permitted us to gauge the relative impact of strategic imperatives imposed by industry regulations as well as contributing cultural influences.
Project GLOBE employs a variety of methods to make comparisons across cultures for culturally generalizable phenomena. The primary method is questionnaire responses of managers in three selected industries. Responses to the questionnaire, when aggregated to the culture level of analysis, provide measurement of the nine core GLOBE culture dimensions. The validity of the middle-manager descriptions of the practices in their cultures (As Is responses) was checked using independently collected unobtrusive measures of the dimensions.
5. BROAD PLAN OF COUNTRY CHAPTERS
The opening section of each country chapter provides a broad and general introduction to the country and also a brief backdrop and context for, and a lead-in to the GLOBE study in the country. This is followed by the historical context of the society indicating the major influences that the societal culture has been through over the years. This usually culminates in a description of the culture in its current state. This is followed by a survey of literature focusing on leadership as it is understood and practiced in the country. In some cases, the authors have also given descriptions of some individuals considered to be outstanding leaders of the country.
The aforementioned is usually followed by a presentation of the quantitative and qualitative findings of societal culture and leadership in the country. The quantitative findings usually consist of the country's scores on “Society As Is” and “Society Should Be” for all the nine dimensions of societal culture described earlier. These are often presented in reference to the maximum and minimum score of these dimensions among all the countries participating in GLOBE, and the rank of the country on each of these dimensions. These quantitative data are interpreted in the societal and cultural context of the country. The interpretations involve integration of the quantitative results, and participant observations and unobtrusive measurements of the societal culture done by the CCIs. This integration of quantitative and qualitative findings also brings out some country-specific manifestations of societal culture. The outcome is a combined, overall profile of societal culture of the country. The authors also provide their own participant observations and unobtrusive measurements of the nine dimensions of societal culture used in GLOBE. Some of the country chapters present a discussion of the findings of organizational practices and culture following this.
The presentation of the findings on leadership usually follows. This often opens with a review of literature on leadership in the country, which is followed by a presentation of the country's scores on the 21 subscales of leadership that emerged from the GLOBE data and the six-second order leadership factors. These quantitative indicators of leadership are also discussed in the context of the society and culture of the country. The presentation of the qualitative findings on leadership usually follows. This consists of the findings of focus groups, in-depth ethnographic interviews, media analysis, and participant observation and unobtrusive measurement. An integration of all these findings results in a combined, overall profile of leadership in the country. Each chapter usually closes with recommendations of the author(s) for foreign managers who may have to deal with managers from the country that has been written about or who may have to work in that country. Several country chapters also include sections on the limitations of the research on which the chapter is based and possible directions for future research.
CCIs have collected unobtrusive measures of the nine GLOBE “As Is” and “Should Be” dimensions. These dimensions reflect the practices and values in the culture. CCIs have also conducted participant observations of ongoing activities relevant to the interpretation of the culture, not only with specific reference to the nine GLOBE dimensions but also with respect to specific attributes and practices unique to the cultures studied. They have also collected and content-analyzed transcripts based on the predominant printed media (newspapers and magazines) as well as interviews and focus groups conducted with managers in the industries studied. With these data, CCIs were able to describe and interpret selected unique characteristics of their cultures. Such interpretations have given recognition to gender, ethnic, and religious diversity, generational differences, and other possible issues permeating the studied cultures. Thus the complexity and variability of complex cultures with two or more subcultures have also been described. In essence, these CCIs have written a qualitative analysis of major variables relevant to leadership and organizational practices in the countries studied. The attempt has been to ensure at least a moderate level of uniformity and quality of the qualitative research, while maintaining the uniqueness of each culture studied. The completed chapters are based on the combination of the quantitative survey data of the country in focus in comparison with the data collected in all the countries included in the GLOBE Research Program, and the qualitative research findings produced by CCIs. An interpretive analysis of all of the findings is also included. It is hoped that the quantitative-comparative results reported in GLOBE Book 1 (House et al., 2004) and the more qualitative and in-depth analysis of each of the 25 countries included in this book will provide appropriate conceptual frameworks and sufficient data for the development of a cross-cultural theory of leadership and organizational practices.
Project GLOBE employs both quantitative and qualitative methods to provide richly descriptive, yet scientifically valid, accounts of cultural influences on leadership and organizational processes. Whereas House et al. (2004) provides a comparative understanding of all the GLOBE participating countries on all the nine societal culture dimensions, 21 leadership scales, and their relationship with several socioeconomic indicators of these countries, this book provides much more detailed and comprehensive understanding of the 25 countries represented here.
6. PLAN OF THIS BOOK
This introduction is followed next by a chapter describing the methodology of the GLOBE Research Project as a whole and the country-specific methodology followed by most of the country chapter authors. Then follow the 25 country chapters arranged in 10 clusters based on combinations of several characteristics of the societies and cultures (see Gupta & Hanges, 2004, for details of clustering). The clusters in the order presented in the following chapters, with the countries comprising them, are: Nordic Europe (Sweden, Finland), Germanic Europe (Austria, Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland), Anglo (Australia, England, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa/w, United States), Latin Europe (France, Portugal, Spain), Latin America (Argentina, Colombia, Mexico), Eastern Europe (Greece, Russia), Middle East (Turkey), Confucian Asia (China, Hong-Kong, Singapore), Southern Asia (India), and Sub-Saharan Africa. Although there is no separate country chapter for the Sub-Saharan cluster, the country chapter on South Africa (included in the Anglo cluster due to its primary focus being on the White population of South Africa) contains some information about South Africa (Black sample), which belongs to this cluster. The complete clusters of all the cultures that participated in GLOBE are shown in Table 1.2. The country chapters of each cluster are preceded by a short introduction to the cluster that follows. This cluster introduction provides a very brief description of the cluster and the countries comprising it. Unavoidably, the introductions are brief and sketchy, and readers are advised to refer to the following country chapters and the last chapter of this volume (“Integration, Conclusions, and Future Directions”) for specifics and details.
The concluding chapter provides summary of some of the more interesting findings of the country chapters and attempts to integrate some of the common findings. It also focuses on what is common across all the 25 societies represented in this volume and among the countries comprising each cluster. It also describes the reasons for differences wherever differences are found. It does that for both culture and leadership separately, and then also integrates them. It also discusses emerging theoretical and methodological issues, and derives questions for future research and practical implications that will be of use to researchers, students, and practitioners. It takes an integrative view of societal culture, leadership, and the link between culture and leadership from a within-country and also a between-country perspective.
7. CONTRIBUTIONS OF THIS BOOK
Practitioners involved in cross-cultural management will find chapters in this book particularly useful as they prepare for negotiations with managers of a country with which they are not familiar, in planning for joint ventures, mergers and acquisitions, and collaborations. It will also be useful in comparing the finer nuances of countries belonging to the same cultural region in order to understand the subtle differences in countries that appear to be similar on the surface. Such comparisons can be done with several countries in a cluster to get a better understanding of the country one is interested in. An interesting analysis of country clusters is contained in the special issue of the Journal of World Business (2002) devoted to the GLOBE project. More details are presented in the conclusions chapter of this book.
TABLE 1.2
GLOBE Society/Culture Clusters
| Anglo | Latin Europe | Nordic Europe | Germanic Europe |
| *Australia | *France | Denmark | *Austria |
| Canada | Israel | *Finland | *Germany |
| *England | Italy | *Sweden | (Former East) |
| *Ireland | *Portugal | Germany | |
| *New Zealand | *Spain | (Former West) | |
| *South Africa | Switzerland | *Netherlands | |
| (White sample) | (French-speaking) | *Switzerland | |
| *United States | (German speaking) | ||
| Eastern Europe | Latin America | Sub-Saharan Africa | Middle East |
| Albania | *Argentina | Namibia | Egypt |
| Georgia | Bolivia | Nigeria | Kuwait |
| *Greece | Brazil | South Africa | Morocco |
| Hungary | *Colombia | (Black sample) | Qatar |
| Kazakhstan | Costa Rica | Zambia | *Turkey |
| Poland | Ecuador | Zimbabwe | |
| *Russia | El Salvador | ||
| Slovenia | Guatemala | ||
| *Mexico | |||
| Venezuela | |||
| Southern Asia | Confucian Asia | ||
| *India | *China | ||
| Indonesia | *Hong Kong | ||
| Iran | Japan | ||
| Malaysia | *Singapore | ||
| Philippines | South Korea | ||
| Thailand | Taiwan |
*Countries included in this book.
This book makes a significant contribution to the field as it contains rich descriptions of the culture and leadership practices of the represented countries (a) by researchers and scholars who have lived in this country for quite some time and are therefore highly knowledgeable about these countries (b) based, in part, on data collected through rigorous methodologies used across a large number of countries employing instruments with proven high levels of reliability and validity. The chapters in this book combine the strength of the overall GLOBE study (e.g., by positioning the culture of each country within all the countries studied in the GLOBE program) with the strength of detailed qualitative and quantitative accounts of the country being reported on. The rigor of data collection applies equally to qualitative methods employed. This data collection, supplemented by participant observation and unobtrusive measurement by the authors themselves, provides a uniquely rich perspective on the countries being written about. The specific contribution of this volume therefore is to provide descriptions that are rich and thick while being rigorous and standardized at the same time.
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1A more detailed account about how GLOBE operated and developed over time as an organizational and social entity is given in the preface to House et al. (2004).