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In this concluding chapter, we discuss insights and reflections from our invited contributions on the COVID-19 pandemic and derive areas of meaningful future research to advance the global leadership domain. Specifically, we call for (1) strengthening the link of the global leadership domain with related research fields, (2) expanding our view on what are necessary global leadership competencies, (3) moving beyond individual global leadership toward a more collective and collaborative understanding of the phenomenon, (4) further enhancing the growing field of responsible global leadership, (5) examining the various competing tensions that global leaders need to balance, and (6) engaging in greater reflexivity among global leadership scholars ourselves.

As the world struggled to come to grips with the Covid-19 pandemic, over twenty scholars, practitioners, and global leaders wrote brief essays for this curated chapter on the role of global leadership in this extreme example of a global crisis. Their thoughts span helpful theoretical breakthroughs to essential, pragmatic adaptations by companies.

This chapter investigated how pre-existing ideas (i.e., prototypes and antiprototypes) and what the eyes fixate on (i.e., eye fixations) influence followers' identification with leaders from another race. A sample of 55 Southeast Asian female participants assessed their ideal leader in terms of prototypes and antiprototype and then viewed a 27-second video of an engaging Caucasian female leader as their eye fixations were tracked. Participants evaluated the videoed leader using the Identity Leadership Inventory, in terms of four leader identities (i.e., prototypicality, advancement, entrepreneurship, and impresarioship). A series of multiregression models identified participants' age as a negative predictor for all the leader identities. At the same time, the antiprototype of masculinity, the prototypes of sensitivity and dynamism, and the duration of fixations on the right eye predicted at least one leader identity. Such findings build on aspects of intercultural communication relating to the evaluation of global leaders.

We review academic journal articles, chapters in scholarly books, and dissertations that were published in the global leadership domain in 2018 and compare our findings with those of Mendenhall, Li, and Osland’s (2016) earlier review of the 2010–2014 period. Specifically, we trace and discuss relevant changes over time in the number of authors, nature of employed methodologies, linkages of global leadership to related phenomena, and the prevalence of drawing on other conceptual approaches compared to those previously used to study global leadership. We conclude by discussing implications for advancing (1) an integrated body of global leadership theory, (2) novel forms of empirical research, and (3) collaborative global leadership research.

Knowledge transfer is an important global leader (GL) competency, given their role as knowledge brokers and capacity builders. However, knowledge transfer skills and the transfer process itself have received scant attention from both global mobility and leadership scholars. Similarly, multinationals have seldom systematically collected and utilized repatriate knowledge, despite the competitive advantage it represents in a global knowledge economy. To fill this gap, an exploratory qualitative study employing critical incidents and interviews with a multi-country sample of 47 German, Japanese, and US repatriates identified variables that facilitate knowledge transfer attempts to the work unit. Our findings corroborate the proposed variables in a conceptual model of the transfer process and articulate the transfer skills that help explain their ability to transfer. Most importantly, our findings introduce an interactive transfer model that explicates the microprocess of transfer in the repatriate–work unit relationship. We conclude with implications for global leadership research and HRM practice.

International experience (IE) has been acknowledged to be the most useful method for developing global leaders. However, not everyone benefits equally from IE. During the last two decades, our understanding of why this is the case and how global leaders learn from IE has rapidly increased. Several individual and organizational enablers facilitating global leader learning from IE have been identified in the literature, as have learning mechanisms that make such learning possible. However, the literature remains fragmented, and there is a great need to integrate the findings in the field. Therefore, the present paper systematically examines peer-reviewed studies on global leaders' learning from IE published between 1998 and 2019. The study contributes to the extant literature by identifying and integrating individual enablers, organizational enablers, and key learning mechanisms from global leaders' IE and by suggesting topics for future research.

This chapter centers on the global leadership of enterprises and their strategic business decisions as they interact with intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in constructing a supranational global governance regime to address complex global issues. As the world faces myriad issues that transcend state borders, negative externalities of globalization, such as climate change and pandemics, are straining the current system and threatening vulnerable populations. To better understand how firms address these challenges, we present a stakeholder framework involving multinational enterprises (MNEs) in a supranational context and examine their relationships with IGOs, international nongovernmental organizations, and NGOs. A typology of firm behavior is introduced to describe four strategic responses to increased pressure for corporate social responsibility that represent the extent to which firms take leadership roles. Case studies illustrate each of the four archetypes, namely the collaborator, the complier, the counteractor, and the combatant. The situational strength of global governance organizations can have an influence on which strategic response MNEs choose, and ultimately on how MNEs decide to engage in socially responsible behaviors. The interrelatedness of MNEs and global governance organizations will continue to grow as humankind grapples with complex global issues that threaten our way of life. The 4 Cs of MNE strategic responses inform how firms may choose to respond to these challenges.