It is obvious that globalization is the name of the game in business, and no large firms can afford to ignore their overseas markets. Toyota has 39 overseas production centers in 24 countries, Microsoft has offices in over 60 countries, and Nestlé operates in over 80 countries. Even firms from emerging economies are keen to globalize. Haier, a Chinese firm that sells household appliances, conducts business in over 160 nations and operates manufacturing facilities in many countries, including the United States, Italy, Iran, Jordan, Malaysia, and Vietnam.
Our research enterprise lags embarrassingly behind the multinationals in its international reach. A business executive who takes a cursory look at the leading journals in management would no doubt notice that management research is conducted mostly in one place, the United States, and occasionally in a Western European country. One exception is the surge in the number of papers on China, perhaps because China has recently led the world in terms of direct foreign investments (Leung & White, 2004). In any event, our current literature probably reminds this executive of a bygone era some 40 years ago, when most large organizations were based in the West and their primary focus was the Western markets. The international department in these firms was small and peripheral, and typically people on the way down or out were sent overseas.
GLOBALIZING OUR RESEARCH EFFORTS
The GLOBE project is a rare exception to the parochialism of the management literature. With the participation of approximately 17,300 middle managers from 950 organizations in 62 countries, the scale of this project rivals a large multinational corporation. Aside from its theoretical contributions, this project is ground-breaking in demonstrating how management research can be globalized on a scale that is comparable to the best multinationals. The GLOBE project is perhaps the most large-scale international management research project that has ever been undertaken, involving some 170 coinvestigators from 62 participating countries.
Although how the GLOBE team has been operating may be worth the while of a scientific exploration, we know for sure that the complexity of this enterprise has not jeopardized its effectiveness. Peterson (2001) has provided an astute analysis of international research collaborations and a framework for classifying such collaborations based on a taxonomy of multinational corporations. The GLOBE project is classified into the global category, with the logic for collaboration being “collaborative, common research design,” and its utility being “design globally comprehensive theory learning from prior work plus experiences of colleagues” (p. 70). More important to my analysis is that the potential risks and stresses of this type of collaborations include “easy to romanticize. Hard, perhaps sometimes impractical to manage. Easily devolves into international due to varying resource control and available time” (p. 70). “International” in this quote refers to the research goal of evaluating the generalizability of some domestic research in other cultural settings, which lacks originality as compared to global research. In addition, Peterson has provided some examples of dysfunctional dynamics that may threaten a global project, including horse trading (nonsynergistic exchanges), manipulating (uncooperative behaviors that range from passive to aggressive), and expropriating (dominance by those who are resourceful). To overcome such negative dynamics, Peterson has proposed four strategies: a social contract, fostering trust, self-development of collaborators, and an influential leadership and a clear hierarchy. Peterson used the GLOBE project to illustrate the last strategy, and regarded Bob House, the founder and key driver of the project, as an influential, resourceful leader, which is pivotal to the success of the project.
I would add that the GLOBE project also scores high on the first three strategies. The project team assumes a network structure, with Bob House and his key team playing the leading and organizing role. Participants are clear about their roles and obligations as a result of intense face-to-face and written communications. The successful completion of such a colossal project and the consistency displayed by the 25 country-specific chapters in this volume testify to the effectiveness of the social contract that has guided this geographically dispersed, loosely connected team of coinvestigators. Trust among the coinvestigators is evident as they freely exchange ideas and receive credit for their contributions in terms of publications and conference presentations. I was in the audience of a couple of GLOBE symposia, and I was struck by the sincere effort to put all the presenters in the limelight, regardless of whether they were part of the core team or just coinvestigators. I also participated in a couple of informal meetings of the project team to share some ideas on methodological issues, and I witnessed firsthand the free and open exchange among the coinvestigators. Finally, with regard to self-development opportunities, the chapters in this volume make it clear that there is a structured mechanism for individual team members to contribute their local and general knowledge to the project through a variety of physical as well as cyber means. In fact, local knowledge was given a critical role in the planning stage of this project, and the publication of this volume on culture-specific results is a continuous echo of this emphasis. I am sure that the coinvestigators of this project benefit not only from the publications and conference presentations arising from the project, but also from the formal and informal exchange of ideas and expertise.
In summary, the GLOBE project provides a compelling demonstration that with passion, dedication, trust, and ample research funds, an enormous project spanning across many national borders is not only possible, but fruitful. The logistics problems are harsh and trying, but they can be overcome by zeal and curiosity.
CULTURAL DECENTERING AS A STRATEGY FOR GLOBAL RESEARCH
Van de Vijver and Leung (1997) have proposed that an effective way to design a culturally balanced study is to adopt the decentered approach, which involves input from diverse cultural backgrounds to the development of conceptual frameworks and the design of empirical work. The GLOBE project exemplifies this approach. The definition and content of culture and leadership dimensions were the result of collective wisdom gleaned from the first GLOBE research conference in 1994, with the participation of 54 researchers from 38 countries. Furthermore, coinvestigators contributed items to the instruments used, sharpened and reworded items to render them culturally appropriate, assisted in the translation of the instruments, and aided in the interpretation of the results based on indigenous research and unique cultural knowledge. The chapters in this volume document the extensive effort to avoid the dominance of American notions of leadership, and how diverse cultural inputs shaped the final constructs, dimensions, and frameworks emerged from the project.
In globalizing our research effort, diversity in our theorizing is crucial, and I may even go so far as to say that this is a primary reason why we want to go global. Darwin has shown us the supreme value of diversity to the survival and adaptation of species. In the business world, although some people have argued for an inevitable consequence of globalization, isomorphism, the evidence for diversity is mounting (for a recent study documenting divergence in a very global industry, the computer industry, see Duysters & Hagedoorn, 2001). Firms have not become more alike as a result of operating and competing in a global market. Diversity in ideas, constructs, and instruments sprung from global research will ultimately lead to richer, more complete, and more general management theories.
GENERALITY VERSUS RICHNESS
A major strength of the GLOBE project is the deployment of diverse methodologies, both quantitative and qualitative, to enhance the robustness and richness of the findings. The catch from this odyssey is impressive. Nine culture dimensions were identified: Assertiveness, Future Orientation, Gender Egalitarianism, Humane Orientation, Institutional Collectivism, In-Group Collectivism, Performance Orientation, Power Distance, and Uncertainty Avoidance. Six of them correspond to the well-known culture dimensions of Hofstede (1980, 1997), and the remaining three dimensions are also grounded in previous literature. Future Orientation is related to the Past, Present, Future Orientation dimension of Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck (1961); Performance Orientation corresponds to need for achievement (McClelland, 1961); and Humane Orientation is related to the Human Nature Is Good vs. Human Nature Is Bad dimension of Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck, Putnam's (1993) work on the Civic Society, and McClelland's (1985) conceptualization of the affiliative motive.
With regard to leadership behaviors, a total of 21 leadership dimensions were identified, which were found to constitute six factors: Team-Oriented Leadership, Charismatic/Value-Based Leadership, Autonomous Leadership, Humane Leadership, Participative leadership, and Self-Protective Leadership.
A major criticism of this type of etic (culture-general) research for identifying pan-cultural constructs and dimensions is their high level of abstraction and its neglect of subtle, but important local variations and nuances (Morris, Leung, Ames, & Lickel, 1999). An obvious, but hard-to-do, remedy is to augment these etic constructs and frameworks with the richness of emic (culture-specific) concepts and findings (Yang, 2000). This volume, with its richness of culture-specific findings and insights, constitutes an important step of the GLOBE project in giving the etic skeleton flesh and blood. Combining qualitative and quantitative results, and drawing on the extant cultural knowledge and indigenous research on leadership, each of the 25 country-specific chapters describes how leadership is conceptualized and enacted in its cultural milieu, and explores how emic dynamics are related to the etic constructs and frameworks derived from the GLOBE project. It is exactly this type of synergistic integration of culture-general and culture-specific knowledge that is able to address the respective deficiencies of pan-cultural and indigenous research.
IS THE EFFORT WORTH IT?
I would like to end by addressing the bottom-line question. Firms go global not because they love the global village, but because global business is good business. So one may raise the issue of return on investment: Is the new knowledge garnered worth the resources that have gone into the GLOBE project? Only time will tell whether a project actually pays off, and it will perhaps be 10 years from now before we will know for sure. However, all the earlier signals are good, and the pan-cultural dimensions identified and the culture-specific findings obtained will definitely become a major driving force of leadership research in the coming decade.
Although the substantive findings of the GLOBE project are important and valuable in their own right, I want to point out three very important side products that I alluded to earlier. First, this project has leapfrogged management research into the global era by demonstrating how a truly global effort can be sustained and achieved successfully. I hope that the GLOBE project will inspire many others to undertake similarly ambitious global research projects.
Second, the GLOBE project has highlighted many of the theoretical and methodological pitfalls that we encounter in our endeavor to develop universal management theories. I hope this project will bring such conceptual and methodological problems that plague global research to the forefront. It is regrettable that there has not been much progress in solving these problems in the last decade, and more intense research effort into these barriers will hopefully make global research less perplexing and more enlightening and gratifying.
Finally, the GLOBE project has demonstrated a balance of generality and richness as well as a laudable attempt to address cross-level issues. The call for multimethod, multilevel research has been around for decades, but genuine responses to this call are rare. The GLOBE project reminds us of the different limitations of different conceptual and methodological orientations, and of the need to be integrative and pluralistic in our research enterprises. The GLOBE project will go down in the history of management research as a hallmark for diversity, inclusiveness, richness, and multilateralism.
—Kwok Leung
City University of Hong Kong
REFERENCES
Duysters, G., & Hagedoorn, J. (2001). Do company strategies and structures converge in global markets? Evidence from the computer industry. Journal of International Business Studies, 32, 347–356.
Hofstede, G. (1980). Culture's consequences: International differences in work-related values. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
Hofstede, G. (1997). Cultures and organizations: The software of the mind. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Kluckhohn, F., & Strodtbeck, F. L. (1961). Variations in value orientations. Evanston, IL: Row, Peterson.
Leung, K., & White, S. (Eds.). (2004). Handbook of Asian Management. New York: Kluwer.
McClelland, D. C. (1961). The achieving society. Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand.
McClelland, D. C. (1985). Human motivation. Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman.
Morris, M. W., Leung, K., Ames, D., & Lickel, B. (1999). Incorporating perspectives from inside and outside: Synergy between emic and etic research on culture and justice. Academy of Management Review, 24, 781–796.
Peterson, M. F. (2001). International collaboration in organizational behavior research. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 22, 59–81.
Putnam, R. D. (1993). Making democracy work. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Van de Vijver, F., & Leung, K. (1997). Methods and data analysis for cross-cultural research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Yang, K. S. (2000). Monocultural and cross-cultural indigenous approaches: The royal road to the development of a balanced global psychology. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 4, 241–263.