A glimpse of GLOBE

GLOBE is a global project. It is significant and relevant to us in many ways, in broadening our understanding cultures and leaders across the globe. Let’s discover what, why and how of it, in today’s column.

Overview

GLOBE denotes Global Leadership and Organisational Behaviour Effectiveness (GLOBE). It is a multi-phase, multi-method research project in which investigators around the world examine the inter-relationships between societal culture, organisational culture, and organisational leadership.

The goal of the GLOBE project is to develop empirically based theories to describe, understand, and predict the impact of specific cultural variables on leadership effectiveness and organisational cultures in societies. GLOBE defines culture as “shared motives, values, beliefs, identities, and interpretations or meanings of significant events that result from common experiences of members of collectives and are transmitted across age generations.”

With regards to a global scale study on culture, the first name that comes to our mind is Geert Hofstede, a Dutch anthropologist. After his landmark study in 1980s, there has been a renewed interest in more cross-cultural studies across the world. GLOBE exceeds all global cultural studies done so far in scope, depth, duration, and sophistication.

GLOBE as a research program was conceived in 1991 by Robert J. House of the Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania. In 2004, its first comprehensive volume on “Culture, Leadership, and Organisations: The GLOBE Study of 62 Societies” was published, based on results from about 17,300 middle managers from 951 organisations in the food processing, financial services, and telecommunications services industries.

A second major volume, “Culture and Leadership across the World: The GLOBE Book of In-Depth Studies of 25 Societies” became available in early 2007. It complements the findings from the first volume with in-country leadership literature analyses, interview data, focus group discussions, and formal analyses of printed media to provide in-depth descriptions of leadership theory and leader behaviour in those 25 cultures.

Salient features

Approximately 200 social scientists and management scholars from 61 countries with 62 cultures are engaged in this long-term programmatic series of cross-cultural leadership studies. It was planned to be conducted in three phases.

Phase 1 of the program consisted in the development of an underlying theory and standardised questionnaires with good psychometric properties such as high agreement of respondents of the same culture and low agreement between cultures. In Phase 2 these questionnaires were used to study a number of core properties of each of the participating cultures in terms of responses by managers. The results of Phase 2 were published in 2004. The results of Phase 3, in which the project examined 25 cultures in greater detail, appeared in 2008.

The methodology was based in part on earlier work by Geert Hofstede. In response to the published results of Phase 2, Hofstede criticised some elements of GLOBE’s approach such as overly abstract wording of questions, neglect of correlations with wealth, neglect of male–female differences and addressing only managers with the questionnaires.

A by-product of the project was the division of the societies into 10 cultural clusters based on similarities in the responses. Similar projects include Ronald Inglehart’s World Values Survey and Shalom H. Schwartz’s Survey of Values.

Societal cultures

The 62 “societal cultures” assessed by GLOBE range from Albania to Zimbabwe. They comprise all the business-oriented societies you might hope to find with the exceptions of Norway and Saudi Arabia, plus several you might not expect such as El Salvador, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Namibia, Qatar, Slovenia and Zambia.

Interestingly, these societal cultures are not referred to as “nations”. The simple reason was that the researchers were admirably thinking as social anthropologists instead of political scientists. Among the 62 are included “Canada (English-speaking),” “Germany (Former East),” “Germany (Former West),” “South Africa (Black sample),” “South Africa (White sample),” and finally both “Switzerland (French-speaking)” and “Switzerland” (German-speaking).

To aid in the interpretation of findings, the researchers grouped the 62 societies into 10 “societal clusters” or simply “clusters.” The clustering decisions were finalised before the research findings were collected, not as a result of the findings. One of the more interesting chapters in the above mentioned book concerns the reasons why each societal culture was included in this or that cluster. The 10 societal clusters and the number of societies within each cluster can be stated as shown below.

Anglo – 7

Latin Europe – 6

Nordic Europe – 3

Germanic Europe – 5

Eastern Europe – 8

Latin America – 10

Sub-Saharan Africa – 5

Middle East – 5

Southern Asia – 6

Confucian Asia – 6

Their terminology appears rather different to geographical classifications. For an example, Israel is in the “Latin Europe” cluster. About this decision, the authors explain that, long ago, some Jews in Southern Europe converted to Catholicism due to religious persecution while others migrated to Eastern Europe. Members of the latter group were largely responsible for founding Israel, and they “retained their social and business ties with the Latin European region”.

Cultural dimensions of GLOBE

GLOBE’s major premise (and finding) is that leader effectiveness is context specific. This means that it is embedded in the societal and organisational norms, values and beliefs of the people being led. In other words, to be seen as effective, the time-tested adage continues to apply: When in Rome do as the Romans do.

As a first step to gauge leader effectiveness across cultures, GLOBE empirically established nine cultural dimensions that make it possible to capture the similarities and/or differences in norms, values, beliefs – and practices — among societies. They build on findings by Hofstede (1980), Schwartz (1994), Smith (1995), Inglehart (1997), and others. They are:

Power Distance: The degree to which members of a collective expect power to be distributed equally.

Uncertainty Avoidance: The extent to which a society, organisation, or group relies on social norms, rules, and procedures to alleviate unpredictability of future events.

Humane Orientation: The degree to which a collective encourages and rewards individuals for being fair, altruistic, generous, caring, and kind to others.

Collectivism I (Institutional): The degree to which organisational and societal institutional practices encourage and reward collective distribution of resources and collective action.

Collectivism II (In-Group): The degree to which individuals express pride, loyalty, and cohesiveness in their organisations or families.

Assertiveness: The degree to which individuals are assertive, confrontational, and aggressive in their relationships with others.

Gender Egalitarianism: The degree to which a collective minimises gender inequality.

Future Orientation: The extent to which individuals engage in future-oriented behaviors such as delaying gratification, planning, and investing in the future.

Performance Orientation: The degree to which a collective encourages and rewards group members for performance improvement and excellence.

To summarise, within each of the nine cultural dimensions, the GLOBE researchers probed respondents about both practices and values, and did so within both the larger society and the specific organisation.

Assessing leadership

One of the most important questions addressed by the GLOBE research team concerned the extent to which the practices and values associated with leadership are universal, and the extent to which they are specific to just a few societies.

To probe this issue, the team began with a large number of possible leader “attributes.” As a result of their findings from the 17,300 respondents worldwide regarding all these attributes, the team was able to identify 21 “primary leadership dimensions” or “first order factors” that in all societal cultures are viewed as, to some extent, contributing to a leader’s effectiveness or lack of effectiveness These 21 leadership scales were statistically and conceptually reduced to six scales, resulting in six leader styles.

The performance-oriented style (called “charismatic/value-based” by GLOBE) stresses high standards, decisiveness, and innovation; seeks to inspire people around a vision; creates a passion among them to perform; and does so by firmly holding on to core values.

The team-oriented style instils pride, loyalty, and collaboration among organisational members; and highly values team cohesiveness and a common purpose or goals.

The participative style encourages input from others in decision-making and implementation; and emphasises delegation and equality.

The humane style stresses compassion and generosity; and it is patient, supportive, and concerned with the well-being of others.

The autonomous style is characterised by an independent, individualistic, and self-centric approach to leadership.

The self-protective (and group-protective) style emphasises procedural, status-conscious, and ‘face-saving’ behaviours; and focuses on the safety and security of the individual and the group.

These have been incorporated in a detailed questionnaire that was used for GLOBE study. Findings indicated patterns highlighting regional differences.

Relevance to us

Even though Sri Lanka was not included in the sample, the South Asian patterns (Southern Asian to be precise in line with GLOBE terminology) are useful for us. According to GLOBE study, the most notable differences lie in South Asian cultures’ higher levels of Power Distance practices, In-Group Collectivism practices and lower levels of Uncertainty Avoidance practices. Furthermore, there are some marked discrepancies in cultural values. As compared to Nordic European cultures, South Asian cultures show higher levels of Institutional Collectivism, Uncertainty Avoidance, and Future Orientation.

 I see the findings as a widening of our understanding of culture, particularly in going beyond popular (yet questionable) cultural dimensions of Hofstede. It should help us to link our typical behaviours to a particular cultural element. For an example, the traditional Guru-Gola (Teacher-student) relationship symbolises the high power distance prevalent in our society. Having a tall hierarchy from the director to the driver is how organisations show a similar power distance.

More insights and implications of GLOBE can be captured only through participating in global research by local researchers. This has in fact become a dire need.



(Dr. Ajantha Dharmasiri is a learner, teacher, trainer, researcher, writer and a thinker in the areas of Human Resource Management and Organisational Behaviour.  He can be reached on [email protected].)