Culture Leadership and Organisations

Abstract

Anthropologist Redfield (1948) defined culture as “shared understandings made manifest in act and artifact” (p. vii). This is consistent with the definition used by the GLOBE research project, which examines culture as practices and values. Practices are acts or “the way things are done in this culture,” and values are artifacts because they are human made and, in this specific case, are judgments about “the way things should be done.” GLOBE measured practices and values exist at the levels of industry (financial services, food processing, telecommunications), organization (several in each indus try), and society (62 cultures). Thus, the GLOBE researchers measured culture at dif ferent levels with both practices and values. Then they asked: How is culture related to societal, organizational, and leadership effectiveness? The GLOBE research could be called the Manhattan Project of the study of the rela tionship of culture to conceptions of leadership. One hundred and seventy investigators from 62 cultures worked on this project. Twenty of them participated in writing this book. They tested 27 hypotheses that linked culture to interesting outcomes, with data from 17,300 managers in 951 organizations. They measured the variables with cultural sensitivity, developing instruments in consultation with members of the relevant cul tures. By using focus groups, and by heavy dependence on the previous literature, the investigators developed instruments that tapped local meanings that were appropriate for each level of the data and also had equivalence across cultures.