Leadership lessons from Project GLOBE

What is Project GLOBE?

Project GLOBE is a research project that surveyed 17,000 middle managers from 61 countries to better understand the inter-relationships between societal culture, organisational culture and organisational leadership.  The leadership attributes assessed by the project are:

• Charismatic/Value-based - reflects the ability to inspire, to motivate, and to expect high performance from others based on strongly held core values; such leaders are able to create, or drive the creation of, a vision for the organisation and communicate and model that vision and inspire the organisation to pursue the vision.
• Team-oriented - emphasises team building and a common purpose among team members; this type of leader promotes collaboration and a team-based workplace.
• Participative - reflects the degree to which leaders involve others in making and implementing decisions; such leaders employ inclusive decision-making, they delegate responsibility and don't try to lead by command.
• Humane-oriented - emphasises being supportive, considerate, compassionate, and generous.
• Autonomous - refers to independent and individualistic leadership, which includes being autonomous and unique
• Self-protective – invokes a focus on the safety and security of the leaders themselves; self-centred and self-protective.

The charismatic/value-based, team-oriented, and participative stles are associated with exceptional leadership; humane orientation has some association with exceptional leadership; autonomy may impede or facilitate (both slightly) exceptional leadership; the self-protective style impedes exceptional leadership.

Leadership in the 'Anglo' countries

The following chart shows the rating on each dimension for the Anglo cluster as a whole and for Australia, New Zealand and the USA.

As you can see form the chart, the leadership style preferred in “anglo” countries is charismatic value-based with a need to be visionary and inspiring. This must be accompanied by a team orientation and a participative approach.

Societal culture and leadership

Differences across the cluster are slight, but nuances of leadership style are required depending on the culture of each country. The Project GLOBE cultural dimensions are not described here but can be found in http://www.thunderbird.edu/wwwfiles/sites/globe/pdf/jwb_globe_intro.pdf. The societal practices ('as is') scores and the societal values ('should be') for the Anglo cluster are given in the charts below.

The next chart includes the practices and values scores for Australia.

We can see a desire to be more future-oriented, more gender-egalitarian, more family-oriented, more performance-oriented and more humane-oriented, but with less acceptance of an unequal distribution of power (power distance).

The Australian Leader

WIth regard to leadership, the Australian cultural profile indicates that good leadership requires an acceptance of the egalitarian nature of the society – a leader must be 'one of us' – while not being too assertive and not exhibiting self-serving behaviour. Exceptional leadership in the USA and New Zealand will be similar but not exactly the same due to cultural and values differences. This suggests caution when applying US management approaches in other countries, even other 'anglo' countries.