Topic: Leadership, Culture
Publication: Industrial and Organizational Psychology: Perspectives on Science and Practice (JUN 2012)
Article: Global Leadership: A Developmental Shift for Everyone
Authors: Katherine Holt and Kyoko Seki
Reviewed By: Nupur Deshpande
To begin on a personal note, in reading even the first few lines of this article, I had several ‘Ah-ha’ moments! This article details the potential issues of having only American or U.S.-based psychologists studying cross-cultural issues in the field. The Western ideals and perspectives may bias the research and be inapplicable to other audiences. This article brings to light all the discrepancies inherent in the cross-cultural psychology literature such as definitional confusion about culture-general and culture-specific dimensions, intercultural sensitivity, and competency models.
To address these concerns holistically, the authors propose four changes to the research direction, along with inherent challenges in the definition, conception, development, and adoption of cross-cultural research by global leaders. These shifts are: (a) developing a metric for multicultural effectiveness (b) becoming adept at managing the paradoxes inherent in global work (c) cultivating the “being” dimension of human experience, and (d) appreciating individual uniqueness in the context of cultural differences. Additionally, the authors propose a framework of 10 paradoxes organized into five categories of performance, relationships, culture, agility and orientation facing global leaders.
In this article, the authors urge the I/O Psychology community to integrate the various perspectives about cross cultural psychology, explore potential dimensions that might address developmental gaps, revamp existing models to incorporate paradoxes and to create, develop, and cultivate these developmental shits in the way we work.
human resource management, organizational industrial psychology, organizational management
