How culture can impact business leadership performance

Two examples of how pressure impacts a global leader\'s performance.

From global leaders of publicly traded companies, pressure can be an enormous incentive to mislead or obfuscate financial performance. For many publicly traded companies, Wall Street often pressures leaders into making quarterly figures or provided annual guidance. This guidance is often related uncertain facts such as revenue growth, margin and ultimately profitability. However, as COVID-19 has shown, the future can become very uncertain which makes financial projections from global leaders uncertain. In many instances, to make the financial projections, global leaders may engage in unethical behavior designed to appease investors, and maintain the stock price. Historically global leaders have done this through fraudulent accounting activity such as sending products to consumers prior to making a sale in order to generate higher revenue. In addition companies have been know to offer large incentives right before year end to encourage consumes to purchase enough products so they can make annual sales figures. Certain global leaders such as those in Enron simply hid financial transaction from investors to make the company appear more profitable than it was. All of these often occurs due to pressures placed on global leaders to make financial numbers that inherent uncertain (Ash forth, 1995).

In addition, pressure can impact global leaders by allowing them to reach new leadership levels they previously thought unattainable as it relates to skills development. Pressurized moments allow the best leaders to excel and leverage their skills to help the organization. For example, Black Berry was once heralded as one of the preeminent smart phone providers in the world due to their unique design and security features. However, competition from Apple, Google, and Microsoft ultimately whittled down the market share of Blackberry. Due to lackluster sales the phone manufacturing division of the company was eventually sold. The global leader John Chen would eventually take over as CEO and switch the entire focus off the business towards software and security. This ultimately resulting a much more profitable business with BlackBerry still relevant in the market today. The pressure of losing a once dominate company allowed the business to focus much more heavily on the software side, thus saving thousands of jobs intact (Bakker, 2014).

How does cultural immersion benefit global leaders? Are there any cons?

Cultural immersion benefits global leaders as it allows them to become much more accustomed to the difference between human and their overall value systems. For example, eastern Asian countries are much more collectivistic and therefore have a different set of values than their western counterparts. Currently the misunderstanding of these values and an inability to communicate differences have cause a rift between U.S. and China relations. This rift has created a massive trade war the only harms both countries in the long run. Global leaders should learn from this mistake and look to embrace the various values and belief systems without their organization. Leaders do not need to accept all of the difference and in fact, may disagree with them (Ang, 2005). However global leaders should make a concerted effort to understand the differences in cultural value and beliefs. Through this behavior, global leaders will be in a better position to not only empower its employee base, but also leverage them to improve the overall corporate culture. This could potentially to better communication among culturally diverse teams, more trust in leadership, and a much more fulfilling work environment for all employees through meaningful interactions. Likewise, this can mitigate the common stereotypes that leaders often have related to a certain culture or race. By the removal of ignorance and enhancing understanding, many of subconscious biases leaders have towards those of different cultures can be properly eliminated (Benet-Martinez, 2002).