Evolution of Cross-Cultural Management to Global Leadership

Discuss About The European Journal Of International Management.

Allan Bird and Mar E Mendenhall’s collaborative work on cross-cultural management researches and global leadership have been instrumental in the field of global leadership. The article titled From cross-cultural management to global leadership: Evolution and adaptation provides deep insights into the world of cross-cultural management and the ways it influenced the formation of global leadership (Bird and Mendenhall 2016). The studies on cross-cultural management, argue the authors are not a new trend and these have been carried out in the early years of the 20^th century. The authors embark upon the issue of global leadership from cross-cultural perspective and reveal many interesting findings.  In the article, they put forth the development of cross-cultural management through different eras that resulted from the changing business environments.

The essay conducts a literature review of the said article and attempt to uncover other relevant researches that have been dedicated to this field. Further, the essay will try to relate the main article to other works by various scholars and understand the importance of cross-cultural management research in the field of global leadership. The essay will also provide the strengths and weaknesses the research on cross-cultural management has about understanding global leadership.

Culture has had a crucial role to play in the smooth functioning of organizations mostly in today’s world. In the past however, when people were unaware of the trends of globalization, cultural efficiency within organizations was not a compulsory requirement (Choo 2013). Nonetheless, as time passed and boundaries started to blur, the need for cultural competency was realized by organizations. As the authors suggest in the main article, focus on cross-cultural management has been a trend that became visible some five decades ago. During the 1900s, journals based on management used to publish articles that were targeted towards the psychology of beings. Gradually, during the 60s, the journals began to publish articles on business spanning across the world. The articles focused primarily on the issue of cross-cultural management and its role in global leadership. The authors argue that global leadership emerged because of the increases studies on cross-cultural management. However, Mor, Morris and Joh (2013) present a different argument and state that cross-cultural management addresses only the issues concerning management across organizations form the cultural diversity perspective. The author believes that global leadership is a separate study and it evolved on its own, not through the evolvement of studies on cross-cultural management.

Relevant Research Dedicated to Cross-Cultural Management Study

Dell’Apa, Smith and Kaneshiro-Pineiro (2014) studied the influence of culture on management throughout nations and argues that the contemporary studies failed to consider the overall aspects of culture. In the main article, it has been mentioned that during the period between 1960 to 1980, major American firms began to dominate the international market and thus formed texts on cross-cultural management from their own viewpoint. This idea resonates in the work by Stahl and Tung (2015) as the authors also highlight the negligence of contemporary institutions in blending the perspectives of both dominant and subordinate class. The authors provide instances of top global management and business schools where Western perspectives on cross-cultural management are given prominence. This has led to one-directional training on cultural competency where expatriates are trained to adjust to a foreign land but the local employees are not trained to interact or manage the expatriates.

Bird and Mendenhall (2016) proceed systematically throughout the article focusing on the rise of international, the rise of culture and the rise of global. The period from 1960 to 1980, as already mentioned, witnessed the rise of international management.  The next two decades saw the emergence of culture within organizational management and the last decade starting from 2000 until the present day witnessed the rise of the term global. The international management concept appeared when cross-cultural management studies began evaluating the role of the “foreign” or the “other” in management other than the U.S. later, during the 1980s throughout the 2000, the scholars of management shifted their focus from international to culture. The scholars witnessed the emergence of multifarious companies that were characterized by multi-domestic and regional and matrix structures of organizations. The expatriates were imparted training on working effectively with employees mostly their subordinates in nations where the organization operated. This led to the scholars devising ways to understand the different cultures more clearly and Geert Hofstede provided that ground. The authors of the main article also state that the findings during this age had enough credibility to be used as practical recommendations for managers to apply. Furthermore, the use of Hofstede’s cultural studies resulted in the formation of several other frameworks that relate to cultural efficiency (Kaynak, Fulmer and Keys 2013). This gave rise to the concept of global. Leaders of various companies found themselves in a situation where they had to manage operations on a global platform. The emergence o global leadership was thus witnessed during this period.  Global leadership received the impetus to manage business across cultures from Hofstede’s theory. The new types of leaders were seen engaged in activities that spanned across boundaries as found in several research studies. Despite this fact, point out the authors, this boundary spanning did not receive much attention from scholars initially.

Importance of Cross-Cultural Management Research in Global Leadership

In the field of cross-cultural management study, Adler (1983) had a significant role to play, as the author was responsible for introducing three different types of cross-cultural management research. The author introduced unicultural research, comparative research and intercultural research into the field of cross-cultural management. Unicultural research was based on studying organizational management in a single nation while comparative research focused on two or more countries. Intercultural research on the other hand, examined the organizational management that involved interaction among members of organizations present in multiple countries. Berry (2015) focuses on the implications of global psychology on cross-cultural management research. According to the author, the psychology in both science and practice has been largely developed by the North American and European philosophers and psychologists. It thus resulted in the findings of the researches on cross-cultural management confined to limited origins. Owing to this, the discipline failed to take into account the role of culture “in development and display of human behavior”. Therefore, the leaders of international firms based mostly in Europe and North America could not comprehend the cultural needs beyond their own nations, which resulted in a weak leadership display.

Bird and Mendenhall (2016) have also mentioned the origins of research in the field of global leadership in their article. According to them, global leadership studies are multifarious and mirror the collective contributions of expatriate, comparative leadership, intercultural communication and global management research streams. The authors then explain the meaning of each stream starting from expatriate. Expatriate, as they explain is the term given to employees who are sent to other countries to work for around six months to five years. Expatriate researches over the years have focused on the selection and training of the employees and their consequent adjustment in different cultures (McEvoy and Buller 2013). These were followed by the transformational period of the expatriates. The next stream, which is intercultural communication, refers to the capacity to perform effectively communication behaviors in a culturally diverse environment. This stream greatly influenced the study of global leadership because communication holds a vital place in successful organizational management. Researches on this stream have highlighted on the different styles of communication applied by leaders to communicate across cultures. The last stream that is comparative leadership involves the study of leaders’ behaviors across multiple cultures. Again, the authors mention the contribution of Hofstede in providing impetus to this field of global leadership research.

Studies on The Influence of Culture on Management Throughout Nations

Santoso and Loosemore (2013) comment on the lack of adequate research in the challenges of managing expatriates and state that firms based in Australia focus more on technical knowledge rather than behavioral skills. The authors further pointed out the limitations of expatriate management as often the assignments prove to be a hurdle to career progression rather than an opportunity or investment. The findings of their study, mention the authors are contradictory to the studies conducted on international human research in the contemporary setting as described in the main article. Fall et al. (2013) on the other hand talked about the influence of intercultural communication on global leadership and argued that researches on intercultural communication are limited and thus failed to provide a solid ground for leaders to initiate. Miska, Stahl and Mendenhall (2013) further highlight intercultural competencies as the factor that enables global leaders to address successfully the corporate responsibility associated demands of global stakeholder communities. Intercultural communications studies have contemporary scholars to comprehend the ways in which effective communication is viewed in global leadership processes.  Scholars have undertaken comparative leadership research, which is the third stream in the global leadership study, the least over the years. The most instrumental work in this field is that of only Hofstede who transformed the way leadership and management is viewed by researchers. Hofstede’s cultural dimensions that include the power distance index have helped scholars understand the applicability of leadership theories in different countries. The different types of leaderships were characterized by the high or low power distance index. Muenjohn and Armstrong (2015) investigated the credibility of cross-cultural leadership and found that cultural values influence leadership behaviors largely. They further argued that there is a conflict among researchers on whether leadership behaviors are specific to given cultures or not.

In the main article, the authors also talk about the fourth stream of global leadership research that is global management. They state that global managers are researched often in contrast to domestic or local managers because it involves a labyrinth of responsibilities and demands across multiple regions. In the views of Collings (2014), global management in the 21^st century is hardly demarcated from global leadership and both are interconnected. Bird and Mendenhall (2016) have made similar assumptions regarding managers and leaders in the main article. They have highlighted the blurring lines between managers and leaders in the 21^st century as managers are now given the added responsibility to make strategic decisions for the organization.

Origins and Evolution of Research in Global Leadership

The comprehensive effort by Bird and Mendenhall (2016) to bring to the surface, the several researches that have been undertaken across eras on cross-cultural management is appreciated because of its all-encompassing nature. However, it must be noted that the authors have not provided any clear stance on the limitations of cross-cultural management research and its role in forming global leadership. Li (2014) on the other hand claims that in the contemporary setting, cross-cultural management researches have failed to consider a broad range of cultural perspectives and this now seems to be a “lethal limitation”. The authors contend that contemporary cross-cultural management studies particularly in top business management institutes in the world are primarily concerned with the ideas and values presented by Western scholars. This leads to the negation of the entire concept of cross-cultural management as scholars try to impose the Western philosophy of management irrespective of the differences in culture. Parris and Peachey (2013) assert further that global leadership research that is considered the result of cross-cultural studies on management lacks clarity even today because it cannot define the dominance of the western perspective.

Conclusion

Cultural influences and the consequent studies on cross-cultural management emerged because of the events like the two World Wars and globalization. These events brought together the different nations that once had no business in each other’s matters. However, the need to involve in the matters of developing nations was gradually realized whether in matters of political concern or economic concern. Globalization brought with it, a remarkable trend in business and management in particular to conduct business operations in other nations. In the essay, the article by Allan Bird and Mark E Mendenhall has been reviewed in order to understand an overall perspective on cross-cultural management research and its influence on global leadership. the essay did a systematic analysis of the topics raised by the authors that included rise of culture, rise of international and the rise of global. it also provided an analysis of cross-cultural management researched in the contemporary context and its limitations. Further research and analysis on the role of cross-cultural management research is recommended.

References:

Berry, J.W., 2015. Global psychology: implications for cross-cultural research and management. Cross Cultural Management, 22(3), pp.342-355.

Bird, A. and Mendenhall, M.E., 2016. From cross-cultural management to global leadership: Evolution and adaptation. Journal of World Business, 51(1), pp.115-126.

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Dell’Apa, A., Smith, M.C. and Kaneshiro-Pineiro, M.Y., 2014. The influence of culture on the international management of shark finning. Environmental management, 54(2), pp.151-161.

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Miska, C., Stahl, G.K. and Mendenhall, M.E., 2013. Intercultural competencies as antecedents of responsible global leadership. European Journal of International Management, 7(5), pp.550-569.

Mor, S., Morris, M.W. and Joh, J., 2013. Identifying and training adaptive cross-cultural management skills: The crucial role of cultural metacognition. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 12(3), pp.453-475.

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