!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> Streamline Training & Documentation: Project GLOBE I: Leadership in France

Friday, July 14, 2006

Project GLOBE I: Leadership in France

I decided to mark Bastille Day by looking into what might be distinctive about views of leadership in France. In hunting around for some information on the subject, I came upon a report (.doc) produced by Project GLOBE called "Cultural Influences on Leadership and Organizations."

The Project GLOBE research investigates "how the role of culture influences leadership and organizational processes." The questions considered include:
What characteristics of a society make it more or less susceptible to leadership influence? To what extent do cultural forces influence the expectations that individuals have with respect to the role of leaders and their behavior? To what extent will leadership styles vary in accordance with culturally specific values and expectations? To what extent does culture moderate relationships between organizational processes, organizational form, and organizational effectiveness? What principles and/or laws of leadership and organizational processes transcend cultures? [emphasis added]
The GLOBE researchers define leadership as:
the ability of an individual to influence, motivate, and enable others to contribute toward the effectiveness and success of organizations of which they are members.
The researchers identified six leadership dimensions, embodying the characteristics and abilities perceived by people in a culture to contribute to, or to inhibit, outstanding leadership. In common parlance, these leadership dimensions are often called leadership styles. The six are:

Charismatic/Value-Based Leadership — taps ability to inspire, motivate, and communicate high performance expectations on the basis of firmly held values.

Team-Oriented Leadership — emphasizes team building and implementation of a common purpose or goal among team members.

Participative Leadership — involves others in making and implementing decisions.

Humane-Oriented Leadership — is supportive, considerate, compassionate, generous.

Self-Protective Leadership — focuses on ensuring the security of the leader himself/herself.

Autonomous Leadership — exercises independent and individualistic decision-making.

The researchers also identified nine cultural attributes that can be measured in order to capture significant cultural differences among organizations and societies:

Uncertainty Avoidance — the extent to which members of an organization or society try to avoid uncertainty by reliance on social norms, rituals, and bureaucratic practices to alleviate the unpredictability of future events.

Power Distance — the degree to which members of an organization or society expect and agree that power should be unequally shared.

Institutional Collectivism — the degree to which organizational and societal institutional practices encourage and reward collective distribution of resources and collective action.

In-Group Collectivism — the degree to which individuals express pride, loyalty, and cohesiveness in their organizations or families.

Gender Egalitarianism — the extent to which an organization or a society minimizes gender role differences.

Assertiveness — the degree to which individuals in organizations or societies are assertive, confrontational, and aggressive in social relationships.

Future Orientation — the degree to which individuals in organizations or societies engage in future-oriented behaviors such as planning, investing in the future, and delaying gratification.

Performance Orientation — the extent to which an organization or society encourages and rewards group members for performance improvement and excellence.

Humane Orientation — the degree to which individuals in organizations or societies encourage and reward individuals for being fair, altruistic, friendly, generous, caring, and kind to others.

Having defined and validated their lists of leadership dimensions and cultural attributes, the researchers collected assessments from thousands of middle managers in 62 countries, including France. Specifically, the managers were asked to report:
  • for each underlying leadership attribute and behavior,1 their assessment of the extent to which it contributes to or impedes effective leadership.


  • for each cultural attribute, their assessment of the extent to which it is actually practiced in their organization and country, and the extent to which it should be practiced.
The full details of country-level results will not be available until January, when Project GLOBE will publish a book covering 25 of the countries studied. In the meantime, an article (pdf) published in 2002 provides basic information on the results for France:
  • The only leadership style that French managers rate higher, on average, than managers elsewhere in the world is the Participative style. For the other styles — Charismatic, Team-Oriented, Humane, Self-Protective, and Autonomous — the French managers give a lower score, on average, than managers elsewhere.


  • For the cultural attributes, the biggest differences between the Is and Should Be scores are for (1) the Power Distance attribute, which French managers find to be considerably higher in actuality than they believe it should be, and (2) the Humane Orientation attribute, which French managers believe in actual practice falls well short of where it should be.


  • The Assertiveness and Uncertainty Avoidance attributes also have their Should Be scores above their Is scores.


  • For all the other cultural attributes — Institutional Collectivism, In-Group Collectivism, Gender Egalitarianism, Future Orientation, and Performance Orientation — the Should Be score is below the Is score, i.e., the managers believe these attributes are present to a greater degree than is ideal.
Project GLOBE's in-depth information on the interaction of culture and the characteristics of effective leaders is well worth tapping for training and development. Designing training that has participants explore how the Project GLOBE findings apply to their particular business relationships and activities will help them refine their ability to assume a leadership role in a different culture.

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1 Each of the six leadership dimensions has associated with it underlying leadership attributes and behaviors (e.g., Trustworthy, Encouraging, Irritable, Ruthless). The Project GLOBE research defined 65 such attributes.

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