Global leadership concepts and applications

Globalization & Leadership

Leadership itself, even within a single country or other geographical area, is complex enough but it can become all the more complex and wide-ranging when speaking of a firm or organization that spreads into a new country or series of countries. Many countries that have become part of the globalization landscape are completely different and on many levels than the West and this would include Central and South America as well as Southeast Asia. Even so, there are good and commonsense ways to expand in areas like this while not rubbing the local populace the wrong way or abandoning the core values of the home company and home country in question. While avoiding all cultural and other faux pas is impossible a lot of the time, there are indeed ways to avoid many to most of them.

Analysis

One major way that leadership on a global scale can be managed and perfected would be through effective knowledge leadership. This is something that is especially true in very knowledge-driven sectors like the STEM fields, which is short for science, technology, engineering and mathematics. It was found in one study that the business network size, the amount of diversity, network closeness and contact frequency all contributed to the well-being of the network members as well as the larger business. Leadership in a global context can actually take sort of a backseat when speaking of subjects like this but leadership would also put the kibosh on networking like this and that would be a mistake for a firm that has global aspirations. For example, a leadership group that seeks a global reach should actively encourage a wide variety of sources, theories and outcomes and extending a global reach makes this inherently easier since such diversity would drive that idea quite easily (Mabey, Kulich & Lorenzi-Cioldi, 2012).

On a similar note, educating a global workforce can be difficult as well. As slightly indicated before, the different cultures and norms around the world also include different levels of education and what precisely is emphasized during that education. However, strong globalized leadership in these different countries would directly involve the avoidance of stigmatizing and any sort of racial or nationalistic talk. For example, trumpeting the "American" way of doing things will tend to alienate or even enrage those that are not from the United States (Davis, 2014). Approaching people and workers in developing countries in the right way is important because people tend to unify either for or against the "invading" name brand or business. When speaking of the United States, for example, most countries tend to crave American pop culture and products but areas like the Middle East and Northern Africa would certainly be exceptions to this. Also important to note is that governments and people of these countries might not be on the same age (e.g. Iran). (Terrell & Rosenbusch, 2013).