Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness Research Project
The Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness Research Project (GLOBE) is an international group of social scientists and management scholars who study cross-cultural leadership. The project was founded in 1993 by Robert J. House (University of Pennsylvania). In each of 62 "societies" or "cultures", the project is working with typically two to five social scientists who are responsible for the local research. Most of these societies represent a country, although some countries are subdivided (such as Black and White South Africa) or only a part is covered (English-speaking Canada).
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 criticized 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.
Cultural clusters
Based on similarities in cultural values and beliefs, GLOBE researchers have divided the participating societies into the following cultural clusters:
- Anglo Cultures
- England, Australia, South Africa (white sample), Canada, New Zealand, Ireland, United States, see Anglosphere
- Latin Europe
- Italy, Portugal, Spain, France, Switzerland (French and Italian speaking)
- Nordic Europe
- Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway
- Germanic Europe
- German-speaking Europe (Austria, German-speaking Switzerland, Germany) plus Dutch-speaking Europe (Netherlands, Belgium and Dutch speaking France)
- Eastern Europe
- Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Serbia, Greece, Slovenia, Albania, Russia
- Latin America
- Costa Rica, Venezuela, Ecuador, Mexico, El Salvador, Colombia, Guatemala, Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina
- Sub-Saharan Africa
- Namibia, Zambia, Zimbabwe, South Africa (black sample), Nigeria
- Arab Cultures
- Algeria, Qatar, Morocco, Turkey, Egypt, Kuwait, Libya, Tunisia, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Jordan, Iraq, UAE, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Oman
- Southern Asia
- India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Iran
- Confucian Asia
- Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, China, Japan, Philippines, Vietnam
References
- House, Robert J.; et al., eds. (2004), Culture, leadership, and organizations: the GLOBE study of 62 societies, SAGE, ISBN 9780761924012 .
- Chhokar, Jagdeep S.; Brodbek, Felix C.; House, Robert J., eds. (2008), Culture and Leadership Across the World, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, ISBN 978-0-8058-5997-3 .
- Gupta, Vipin; Hanges, Paul J.; Dorfman, Peter (2002), "Cultural clusters: methodology and findings", Journal of World Business 37: 11–15, http://wase.urz.uni-magdeburg.de/evans/Journal%20Library/International%20Management%20Models/Cultural%20Clusters.pdf .
- Hofstede, Geert (2006), "What did GLOBE really measure? Researchers' minds versus respondents' minds", Journal of International Business Studies 37: 882–896, http://arno.uvt.nl/show.cgi?fid=55816 .
See also
External links