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Robert J. House: University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
GLOBE objectives
In this article, I provide a very brief description of the objectives and potential contributions of the Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness research program (GLOBE) and a description of the history of GLOBE. I also describe the lessons learned from the GLOBE's history and the current status of the GLOBE research program.
GLOBE is a cross cultural research program based on data collected by 160 scholars from 60 countries. The objectives of GLOBE are to investigate several theoretical issues. These are:
the relative rankings of the nations studied with respect to eight core dimensions of culture;
the cognitive and attitudinal processes by which cultural influences affect organizational practices and the exercise of leadership;
whether or not there are leader behaviors and organizational practices that are universally accepted and viewed as effective;
identification of non-universal culture specific leader behaviors and organizational practices that are accepted and viewed as effective in each of the countries studied;
the influence of cultural forces on the social status of leaders and the amount of influence granted to leaders;
the effects of specific environmental and organizational demographic influences on leadership behavior and organizational practices.
Initial conceptualization and early growth of GLOBE
The idea for GLOBE came to me in the summer of 1991. At that time a substantial amount of research had recently been published indicating the validity of the neocharismatic leadership paradigm. Leader charisma had been found to be predictive of individual satisfaction in India (Pereira, 1987)), mean academic performance scores of educational institutions in Singapore (Koh et al., 1991), performance of US presidents (House et al., 1991) and profit and cost performance in large grocery stores in The Netherlands (subsequently published in 1993, Koene et al., 1993). These findings suggested that charismatic leader behavior may be universally acceptable and effective.
Consequently, I began thinking about conducting a cross cultural study based on data to be collected from approximately 20 countries to test the cross cultural generalizability of the neocharismatic leadership paradigm. I began reading the organizational cultural literature to prepare for such a study. After reading a fair sampling of this literature I concluded that I was learning very little because the conceptualization and research methodology of...