Executive Leadership in the Global Village

INTRODUCTION

We currently live in a fast-changing world that has recently been described as the global village. Borders between nations have been blurred to the point that geographic and ethnologic differences are merging under the influence of governments in specialized treaties. This type of organizational environment where clearly demarcated boundaries are more difficult to detect, coupled with increased speed and dynamics within the organizational setting itself, lends thought to how to lead this new and exciting workforce. Transformational leadership is a useful leadership paradigm to lead in the global village due to its adaptability to address different business leadership needs. Transformational leadership is sensitive to cultural and ethnographic differences and brings harmony and equality into the business workforce. This paper uses a historical perspective to see from where the roots of transformational leadership have come from and their connection to global perspectives.

ASSUMPTIONS AND BELIEFS AS A LEADER

We currently live in a fast-changing world that has recently been described as the global village. Borders between nations have been blurred to the point that geographic and ethnologic differences are merging under the influence of governments in specialized treaties. Examples of these treaties include the North American Free Trade Agreement and the European Economic Union. There are influences from lowered trade barriers, globalized competition, and rapid technological development. In this setting, a country’s economic standing rests on new ideas and the ability to thrive in changing circumstances. Adaptability to change, which was once a detriment to business, has become a recognized standard business practice.

The transformational leadership style is ideal to lead this type of workforce. Transformational leadership facilitates growth and harmony, yet when working on individual projects; it allows people to manage many of their own thoughts and ideas. The bulk of this paper will be dedicated to supporting that belief. I am interested in integrating time-tested processes to improve my leadership practice. Kouzes and Posner (2003) developed a table that shows the difference of what people admired in their leaders and how those factors changed over a fifteen-year period. The four characteristics that consistently scored highest were: honest, forward looking, competent and, inspiring (p. 25). I believe that these characteristics are true still today. I plan to examine the culture and the climate of my workplace and see what changes that I can make in myself to become a more effective leader. Leaders are sometimes adventurous, perhaps even pioneers in any given field of endeavor. There is some risk that a leader takes in the practice of leadership. Leaders take a vision, which is a paradigm shift or a new approach to doing a process and then bring this process to fruition, or completion of the mission. By challenging a process, there are certain risks that may be taken. By sharing this challenge with the team, a climate of team spirit evolves that overcomes the desire to stay safe (p.17) or to stay with the status quo. Followers expect effective leaders to display trust and integrity in their judgment. Trust and integrity are the two core values that are important in leadership practice. Ideally, viable solutions will be developed to quickly solve problems as they occur in the future.

AN ANALYSIS OF VIABLE LEADERSHIP METHODS THAT STEM FROM ASSUMPTIONS

Critically reflective practice (Brookfield, 1998) can be an important way to make leadership changes in an organization in small incremental steps. Organizations are comprised of people working towards a similar goal. The global village has been explained as a dichotomy between deculturalization and retribalization. Deculturalization is an ethnographic breakdown where an individual has to adapt to the business requirements of the global village. It is a negative aspect of the external forces in this type of society. Deculturalization is associated with losses of individual or community values that are held dearly by the owner. Ancient customs and traditions are replaced with modernity at the benefit of the stakeholders managing the global village. Shared beliefs and local customs are also negatively influenced or dismissed altogether.

Retribalization is the polar opposite of deculturalization. It is based on a set of philosophies that actively tries to preserve the negative influences of deculturalization. Rather than being an effort to maximize what is best for a company, it seeks ways to incorporate the societal values of the original ethnographic groups. This internally driven process enables diversity and cultural sensitivity in the workforce. There are two major benefits of incorporating unique and specialized societal influences. First and most importantly, the members of the workforce feel welcomer at work; there is less of an organizational boundary to overcome. Second, new perspectives bring new ideas to the table for solving complex problems. What may seem to be an insurmountable problem in one region may have already been solved in another. By adapting solutions, it is usually easier to reach a solution rather than starting from scratch.

Since organizations are dynamic and not static, change is inevitable and it is important to keep the organization on course. It is difficult if not impossible to make large-scale changes in organizations such as bureaucracies without disruption and resistance to change. By regularly evaluating where one stands in an organization, it is easier to adjust to a change or make a change. By using the Critical Incident Questionnaire (Brookfield, 1998) we sustain a culture of critical reflection in this course. Critical reflection of our fellow course learners and ourselves allows us to compare and contrast some of our own leadership practices amongst ourselves in an open forum. The benefit of this process is to overcome one of the significant problems of being a leader, which is how to become a leader. Leadership is not an inborn trait, but rather a learned talent that takes years to fully develop. Additionally, there are different styles of leadership: what works well in one organization, may not work well in another.

One of the causal assumptions that I hold is that I have some first hand knowledge on leadership in the field. I have had the opportunity to develop some of my leadership skills while working in the military. Some of the lessons that I have learned from this experience apply to business leadership. I hold true to the work of Kouzes and Posner (2003), which recommends that it is important to know your people (p. 184). It is important to find out our people’s strengths, weaknesses and opportunities for improvement (p. 184) in order to help them to fit into the organization. It is important for a leader to create avenues to explore fresh ideas and to harness the power of innovation. This philosophy is especially important when leaders evaluate the effectiveness of our own internal and external communication (Kouzes and Posner, 2003).

Sometimes the best ideas on how to solve a problem may come outside of the organization. It has been reported “higher-performing groups had significantly more communication with people outside their labs…” (p. 192). This insight may be valuable when solving problems that may seem too difficult to solve. Whereas “insight” (p. 193) gives you details about the problem itself, “outsight” is valuable to understanding realities external to the cause of the problem itself. Another causal assumption that is important to consider is that not everyone is motivated by the same set of principles. As a larger percentage of the baby-boomer population retires and the workforce is replaced with growing numbers of “Generation X” and “Generation Y”, it will be interested in knowing how to be the most effective leader of the new workforce. New solutions will have to develop to solve motivational problems of a new generation of employees, (Rodriguez, Green, & Ree, 2003).

THEORIES OF LEADERSHIP THAT SUPPORT THIS PHILOSOPHY

 Leadership theories have evolved significantly throughout the 20th and 21st centuries for a variety of reasons. The post-industrial revolution and modernization of working conditions after World War I brought appreciable amounts of automation to the work force such as the assembly-line process used by automobile manufacturers. It was at this point that leadership theory became cross-connected with influences from organizational theory, economics, sociology and psychology. Six types of leadership theory charted in figure 1. for this analysis includes: precursors of leadership theory, group theory, trait theory, behavior theory, situational theory, and transformational theory.

The precursors of the early theorists that influenced leadership theory go back as far as the1700’s. Early theorists from disciplines such as business, economics, and mathematics proposed that a division of labor based on decreased redundancy would decrease cost production. Much of the work in the 18th and 19th century contributed to the group theory of leadership. Leaders in this era commonly worked with small groups of individuals since they could lead who they saw or had easy access to communicate with. Inter-organizational leadership was more difficult to achieve due to lack of timely communication. Global leadership as it exists today was impossible due to communication barriers.

Executive leadership took on a new perspective in this era because leaders could be selected by the traits of their leadership. In this classical era, scientists advocated job specialization by scientifically selecting workers for their occupation. Formal boundaries in the chain of command allowed groups of people to cooperate on different processes within their organizations. Bureaucracies in this era were impersonal. Later, work by Mayo (1924-1927) at the Hawthorne Works of the Western Electric Company broke the paradigm by accident and discovered that workers were more productive because they received attention for their labor. This work ushered in the behavioral theory that included a previously undetected component in leadership, in that workers who feel that their leaders care for them will be happier and thus become more productive. The situational theory developed by Fiedler (1940-1950) emphasized that a leader’s effectiveness depends directly on the personality of the leader and the complexities of the situation. Not all leaders can perform well in all situations. The path-goal theory reconfirmed that appropriate leader behavior influences an organization. Later work in leadership theory uncovered three specific types of leadership behavior orientation: directive, participative and achievement.

Transformational theory has completely merged leadership theory and organizational theory into blurred boundaries to show the significance of their inter-relationship. In order for a leader to be more aware of conditions in an organization, direct feedback from the employee to the leader is encouraged. Although actual decision-making is still done at the top tier level, employee input can make a significant impact on a decision. Kuhn (1996) ushered a change in leadership and is noted for his definition and use of the paradigm shift and how it applies to leadership. Kuhn uses a historical perspective to describe where paradigms form and the linear process in which they are formulated. Although in 1964, Kuhn himself did not undertake to map out the influence of other extrascientific factors affecting choice of scientific theory. Abnor and Bjerke mapped influences in organizational management in 1977. In social science, different perspectives can be held by researchers for which there may be little basis in fact. The contention of philosophies between different schools of thought can lead to a multiple paradigmatic approach to solving a problem. There may be several ways to solve a problem and all of them may be valid solutions. This diversity is important to transformational leadership since it encourages new perspectives for problem solving.

In 2002, Yukl, Gordon, and Taber redefined leadership and categorized leadership behavior with standardized taxonomies. Using hierarchical taxonomy with prior research, they built an integrated taxonomy for leadership behavior and identified twelve specific leadership behaviors and grouped them into three meta-categories. Ackoff advocates that managers scrap the way they normally approach problem solving in general and innovation in particular, (Allio, 2003), who uses a process called “synthetic” thinking, which is a way of thinking about and designing a system that derives the properties and behavior of its parts from the functions required of the whole. Ackoffs’ suggestions to managers for promoting creativity, innovation and better strategy include understanding what’s happening inside and outside the organization and to develop a vision of what the organization could be within the emerging culture and environment. Allert (2005) has described ways that knowledge capital forms the basis of cross-cultural communication.

Cross-cultural communication is particularly useful for diversity management in the global village because it outlines how alliances between different cultural groups. Emotional and human capital assumes much greater significance in globalization trends since it incorporates a creative management style. In 2000, Banerji and Krishnan looked at the relationship between the four factors of transformational leadership: charisma, inspirational leadership, intellectual stimulation, and individualized consideration, and the leader's preference for unethical behavior in India. Sanders, Hopkins, and Geroy (2003) have gone one step higher and proposed transcendental leadership: a style influence with influences to God or a higher power, although some authors believe that transcendental accomplishment can occur without influences from spirituality. Bass (1999) proposes that organization and its members need to be aligned by the transformational leader. This is an active process where the leader actually seeks out who is best for the organization based on the leader’s own opinion. The work supports the model that a leader will be more effective with better followership. Collins (2001) modifies Bass’s model and proposes having a "Level 5" leader at the helm that is an executive in whom extreme personal humility blends paradoxically with intense professional will. This process requires an active change on the leader and less of a change on the follower.

Work by Kanter and Dretler in 1998 shows that mergers and acquisitions by global companies can involve local integration across divisions in order to create within-country synergies. They showed that tapping the power of global brands often requires acknowledging country differences and respecting local norms, thus strengthening the local country unit and enhancing relationships across functions and divisions within it.

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