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Experts respond to the same incentives as people in other areas of human action, and in the same ways. This insight is a truism: Experts are ordinary people, not otherworld creatures. The disciplined pursuit of this common sense observation helps us to reach conclusions about experts that might be surprising or counterintuitive.

The field of global leadership has flourished and advanced in the preceding decade. However, in contrast to the term global leadership, which enjoys conceptual clarity enabling accumulative progress, the construct of global leadership effectiveness is comparatively undertheorized, with instances of definitional ambiguity and disjointed methodological operationalizations across studies. The purpose of this chapter is, thus, to provide a systematic review of the global leadership effectiveness literature. In doing so, our contributions are fourfold. First, we offer an inclusive, comprehensive definition of global leadership effectiveness. Second, we map its construct domain. Third, we review research findings at the individual, group, and organizational levels. Finally, we integrate extant insights and offer suggestions for future research, organized within the typology of the content domain along the identified dimensions of global leadership effectiveness. Together, our goal is to build a foundation for future research examining the roles of leadership and the global context as antecedents of global leadership effectiveness.

The rapidly growing body of global leadership literature still lacks research on both global change and global leader cognition. This chapter presents two case studies describing large-scale global change efforts led by expert global leaders. This is complemented with the results of cognitive task analysis interviews with the two expert global leaders. The findings include task diagrams of the change process they employed and knowledge audits of the most difficult cognitive step in the change processes they led. The audit identifies the elements of expert cognition they utilized, the cues and strategies they employed, and the perceived difficulties novices would experience in similar situations. The findings confirm previous research, solidifying the role and nature of expert cognition in global leaders. We conclude with a discussion of the implications our analysis holds for research and practice.

Most of us believe that entrepreneurs are special. We do this because both scholars and practitioners tell us so.

In this chapter, we show how our understanding of global leadership can be enriched by applying research on expert decision making. We review Klein's model of expert decision making and other research on expert cognition. Then we apply these findings to show how the decision-making processes of expert global leaders might differ from those of novice leaders. Finally, we suggest directions for future research.

Expertise in designing organizations is an important construct for scholars interested in studying the micro-foundations of organizational performance. We investigate the existence and nature of this expertise in this chapter. Conceptualizing the designing of organizations as a problem-solving process, we describe the underlying structure of this problem space. Further, we propose that this process of problem solving should look different for “greenfield” design problems and for “brownfield” redesign problems. We test our arguments through a comparison of the think-aloud verbal protocols of 16 subjects with greater experience with organization design problems (experts) and 16 subjects with significantly lower experience with organization design problems (novices). The results suggest that the parts of the problem that experts focus on are different from those that novices focus on, and expertise matters differently for design and redesign problems.

We focus on the extreme complexity of the global context in relation to global leadership expertise. We relate how the subjects in a qualitative study of expert cognition in global leaders describe their work context. Our goal is to build a foundation for a theoretical argument as to what distinguishes domestic/traditional leadership from global leadership and further clarify the role context plays in challenging and developing global leaders.

Although the term “trigger event” is commonly accepted and frequently mentioned by many disciplines in conjunction with sensemaking, research attention on the trigger event construct is sorely lacking. We chose to examine this construct within a specific setting that global leaders have to master – the intercultural context. After reviewing the relevant literature, we created an original model of trigger events and sensemaking in the intercultural context, which is accompanied by propositions that determine the likelihood of an event rising to the level of a trigger. It is our hope that this theoretical model will lead to a better understanding of how trigger events function in general. The chapter contributes to a greater understanding of the cognitive element of global leadership effectiveness. Finally, the model has practical implications for intercultural and global leadership training and executive coaching.

Business ethics provide a potent source of competitive advantage, placing increasing pressure on organizations to create and maintain an ethical workforce. Nonetheless, ethical breaches continue to permeate corporate life, suggesting that there is something missing from how we conceptualize and institutionalize organizational ethics. The current effort seeks to fill this void in two ways. First, we introduce an extended ethical framework premised on sensemaking in organizations. Within this framework, we suggest that multiple individual, organizational, and societal factors may differentially influence the ethical sensemaking process. Second, we contend that human resource management plays a central role in sustaining workplace ethics and explore the strategies through which human resource personnel can work to foster an ethical culture and spearhead ethics initiatives. Future research directions applicable to scholars in both the ethics and human resources domains are provided.