GLOBE: A twenty year journey into the intriguing world of culture and leadership (2023)

This research examines the roles of multidimensional cultural distance including both value and practice on supporting urbanization, focusing on self-employment of internal migrants in China. Prior to examining the effect of cultural distance, we confirm that self-employment is the dominant choice for urban migrants. Building on Hofstede's theory, we calculating the Kogut and Singh Index of cultural values and cultural practices based on survey data set of World Values. After combining these two indices with China Migrants Dynamic Survey data to construct a comprehensive cross-sectional dataset of 521,166 observational samples from 2010 to 2016, we show that both cultural value distance and cultural practice distance have a negative effect on self-employment of internal migrants in China. According to the theory of labor market segmentation, our results reveal that cultural distance is strongly negative associated with the likelihood for internal migrants to engage in self-employment both for opportunity purpose and necessary purpose. From heterogeneity analysis, negative effects of cultural distances exist in the service industry, manufacturing industry, and the Yangtze River Delta. Further discussion shows that cultural value distance also has an indirect influence on individual behavior through cultural practice. Our results suggest that cultural distance prevents migrants from integrating into the local labor market in the form of self-employment.

Despite the fact that the reliance on project teams and project-based organizations has significantly increased over the past decades, previous meta-analyses paid no attention to the examination of leadership styles in the context of projects. The purpose of this study was to meta-analytically synthesize and investigate the contradictory evidence on the effects of transformational leadership and transactional leadership on project success. The study also examined several project-level and country-level moderators in such effects. The study used 64 effect sizes from 41 primary studies on projects to examine the proposed relationships. The findings suggested that transformational leadership had a stronger effect on project success than transactional leadership. The results further indicated that project-level factors (i.e., project size and project type) moderated the relationships of leadership styles with project success. Moreover, the country-level factors (i.e., power distance, collectivism, and economic status of the country) also moderated some of the relationships. Theoretical and practical implications are provided in the end.

Although the related streams of research have witnessed a burgeoning interest in recent decades, empirical evidence on how strategic orientations are relevant to export performance remains inconclusive. Therefore, this research aims to review and quantitatively synthesize the existing literature on the relationship between strategic orientations and export performance by investigating the moderating effects of home country institutions and measurement factors. Meta-analyzing 42 empirical articles containing 11,518 firms with 185 effect sizes, this study provides strong support for the favorable effects of both market and entrepreneurial orientation on the multiple facets of export performance. Besides, the meta-analysis has uncovered that the magnitude of the correlation between market orientation and export performance is contingent upon the uncertainty avoidance dimension of national culture; but not upon the formal institutions in the home country. Further, the association between entrepreneurial orientation and export performance has been found to be moderated by formal as well as informal institutions of the home country. Significant variations in the influences of market and entrepreneurial orientation on export performance have also been spotted depending on measurement factors, particularly upon objective and subjective measures for assessing export performance and the dimensional nature of the strategic orientation scales.

The inclusion of cultural minorities as senior leaders is of growing importance and relevance to contemporary organizations with increasingly international composition, but much is to be learned about how and when such leaders impact the workplaces they lead. We draw on the “cultural difference” and “cultural congruence” propositions (Dorfman and House, 2004) to build a model for understanding whether and under what conditions cultural minority senior leaders have an impact on the elaboration of task-relevant information and relationship conflict in their workplaces. Hierarchical regression results from a study of 315 Australian workplaces and their senior leaders suggest that, regardless of whether the senior leader is a member of a cultural minority group, an organizational climate for innovation and flexibility increases information elaboration – an effect that is stronger when the organization faces greater environmental turbulence. The results further provide support for a three-way interaction effect, whereby employees in workplaces led by a cultural minority leader have less relationship conflict when climate for innovation and environmental turbulence are both low. We conclude with a discussion of the scholarly contributions and practical implications of our conceptual and empirical work, the limitations of our study, and future directions for this research.

Both business networks and institutional forces are relevant to firm internationalization but they have seldom been studied together. We investigate under what circumstances firms are more likely to adopt non-predictive strategy in light of the influence of the business networks, the institutional forces, and the home market background affecting their internationalization. Based on survey data from 758 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) from Brazil, China, Poland, Italy, and Sweden, our results support the effects of formal institutional distance and cultural differences on the use of non-predictive strategies by SMEs in internationalization decisions, as well as the contingency effects of business network stability and of having an emerging market background. We integrate research on the liability of foreignness and the liability of outsidership and find that business network stability is critical. It does not moderate the relation between cultural difference and NPS adoption but attenuates the negative relation between institutional distance and NPS adoption, indicating that the liabilities of foreignness and outsidership play different roles in internationalization.

Confusion in previous studies over how and when cognitive diversity results in higher or lower performance has led to an examination of the influence of a range of moderator variables. Our study provides new theoretical insights into this field of research by extending the categorization–elaboration model (CEM) through an examination of the interaction effects of multiple convergent demographic diversities on information elaboration, team processes and creativity. Based on comparative fit and an in-group projection model of social categorization theory, the moderating influence of demographic faultlines and subgroup imbalance are also investigated. Using hierarchical regression analysis (HRA), empirical support from 453 team members nested within 91 teams across five organizations was found for the mediating role of team information elaboration on the relationship between cognitive diversity and team creativity. Furthermore, both demographic faultlines and subgroup balance were found to moderate the relationship between cognitive diversity and team information elaboration. Our study provides additional clarity concerning processes underlying the positive effects of cognitive diversity on team performance.

Business Horizons, Volume 65, Issue 4, 2022, pp. 505-517

Relations between U.S. and Chinese corporations are increasingly strained. In this article, we examine how differences in the key domains of corporate governance, underlying corporate philosophy, innovation, and dispute resolution contribute to this strained relationship. We illustrate these differences by examining the relations between Skyworks Solutions (U.S.) and ZTE (China). We discuss the three broad strategies available to U.S. managers in engaging with Chinese corporations, depending on the extent of their involvement and comfort with discord: (1) playing ball, (2) straddling the middle ground, and (3) decoupling.

Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Volume 23, Issue 11, 2019, pp. 952-967

From the popularity of authoritarian political leaders to the under-representation of women in boardrooms, leadership is an important theme in current human social affairs. Leadership is also a prominent research topic in the biological, social, and cognitive sciences. However, these active literatures have evolved somewhat independently and there is a need for synthesis. Acomparative-evolutionary approach can integrate seemingly divergent perspectives by making a distinction between two leadership styles, prestige and dominance, that have contrasting expressions, functions, histories, and neural and developmental pathways. The distinction may help to resolve various scientific puzzles, such as: (i) opposing views on the different functions and expressions of leadership; (ii) the appeal of dominance-style leaders; and (iii) sex biases in leadership emergence in modern society.

The Leadership Quarterly, Volume 28, Issue 5, 2017, pp. 691-700

Abusive supervision is detrimental to both subordinates and organizations. Knowledge about individual differences in personality related to abusive supervision may improve personnel selection and potentially reduce the harmful effects of this type of leadership. Using the HEXACO personality framework, we hypothesized that subordinates perceive leaders high on Agreeableness and Honesty-Humility as less abusive. In a sample of 107 unique supervisor-subordinate dyads that filled out the online questionnaire, we found that both Agreeableness and Honesty-Humility were negatively related to subordinate perceptions of abusive supervision. Our findings contribute to our understanding of the origins of abusive supervision and hopefully stimulate future research on supervisor personality and abusive supervision.

Current Opinion in Psychology, Volume 33, 2020, pp. 142-147

Humans have an evolved flexible followership psychology that enables them to select different leaders in different contexts, depending on their needs. We distinguish a triad of follower needs: (i) guidance into a shared direction, (ii) active protection against threats, and (iii) judicious dispute settlement. These needs relate to critical group coordination challenges described in biology and anthropology and to different evolutionary leadership theories. We describe the contexts, in which these needs emerge, the characteristics of leaders who meet these needs, and the potential risks of following these leaders. We end by discussing the potential of our theory to aid the understanding of leadership in modern organizations, female leadership, leader manipulation of needs, and individual differences between followers.

Learning and Individual Differences, Volume 41, 2015, pp. 30-42

In this article we report on an attempt to replicate the findings from the GLOBE (House et al., 2004) study that utilized measures of perceived social norms. This study was based on N=6938 participants from 33 countries. Four out of nine original dimensions were identified: Humane Orientation, Uncertainty Avoidance/Future Orientation, Power Distance and Gender (Non)Egalitarianism. At the country level, these factors correlated reasonably well with the original GLOBE scales. We report profiles of means for all countries and for nine world regions. For the four perceived social norms, the percentage of total variance — i.e., effect size based on eta-squared statistics and hierarchical linear modelling decompositions — attributable to cross-cultural differences is .20. This effect size is larger than those reported for measures of personality traits and values (Stankov, 2011).

Organizational Dynamics, Volume 42, Issue 3, 2013, pp. 191-197