Search results

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between leaders’ expressed traits and their impact on their country’s COVID-19 outcomes. Some leaders are over relying on masculine traits and dismissing feminine traits. An alternative – androgynous leadership – supports leaders in drawing from the full portfolio of behaviors.

This paper has a theoretical approach using an extensive review of the literature.

Leaders can take a number of actions to fully embrace androgynous leadership. These actions include building a diverse “tempered” team, communicating with respect, recognizing the impact of framing and moving from autopilot to realizing their best androgynous self.

Research limitations include a critique of Bem’s framework as outdated and dichotomous; a categorization of feminine, masculine and neutral behaviors that is determined by the authors; and a focus on leadership style that does not take other dimensions, such as health-care systems, into account.

The authors propose that an “androgynous” leadership style has been used effectively by some political leaders around the globe in the COVID-19 crisis. The COVID-19 context has provided a laboratory for developing and building competence as androgynous leaders.

The mental capacity to look at a situation, pause and explicitly select effective behavior is necessary, but oftentimes, it is not put into practice. By not drawing from a larger portfolio of androgynous behaviors, the opportunity for leaders to their best work is missed.

There is an acknowledgement of the benefits of the combination of masculine and feminine leadership traits. There are also clear recommendations supporting leaders in developing their androgynous leadership skills.

In 1991, the Academy of Management Review (AMR) published a special issue whose focus was on the dearth of internationally oriented management theory and studies addressing this. The management literature was filled with theories formulated primarily by scholars from the United States or other Westernized areas of the world and with studies whose samples were generally, also, from these Western areas. After noting the trend toward international diversity in the “American workforce,” AMR special guest-editors Doktor, Tung, and Von Glinow (1991) noted that the need for theory that tests the international-applicability of management theories was – not only desirable, but – urgent.

Although cross-cultural research tends to compare deeply held values across nations, different cultures can exist within nations, as evidenced by clashes of cultures in Israel, Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. We refer to multicultural teams (MCTs) to reflect our interest in team dynamics involving people from varying cultures (which may or may not include people of different nationalities). MCTs are likely to be characterized by “cultural value diversity,” or varying cultural values among members, and we present data in support of the hypothesis that MCT performance is influenced more significantly by cultural value diversity than by the aggregated level of any particular cultural value or demographic diversity within the teams.

In today's internationalized world, value creation consists of knowledge and work integration involving workers from around the world. Members of these globally distributed work teams (GDWT) encounter organizational behavior issues (identity, cultural differences, and leadership) and organization design issues (dependencies, information processing, media use, and teamwork structures). While most research on GDWT focuses on the first set of issues, this chapter is among the few to systematically explore the second set. We propose and elaborate on strategies for either reducing the intensity of collaboration, or enabling teams to collaborate intensely on a global scale. Implications for research and practice are explored.

Dedicated to our dear families and friends, with special thanks to Champagne, Tuxedo, Zack, Emma, Molly, Googun, Lisa, Calvin, and David for their understanding and support

Bindu Aryais currently a doctoral student in International Business and Strategy at the University of Texas at Dallas. Her dissertation will empirically investigate how collaborative efforts between for-profit, not-for-profit and governmental agencies facilitate outcomes and can function to enhance sustainable development. Her research on how social networks facilitate organizational and group decision-making processes and outcomes has appeared in Journal of Management (forthcoming).

The literature on academic international research teams (AIRTs) has drawn conclusions and made recommendations based on cross-sectional “snapshots” of the research team process – observations made prior to the conclusion of the research project. Several large-scale AIRTs have now evolved through a life cycle including result-related publications. We evaluate and extend the literature using a project life cycle perspective, in which each stage exhibits different challenges and opportunities that influence the quality, reliability and validity of the final research output and the overall viability of the knowledge-creation project. We conclude with recommendations for the effective management of AIRTs and, indeed, perhaps all multinational, globally distributed teams engaged in both basic and applied knowledge creation.

Are global business teams (GBTs) nothing more than just a group of individuals collaborating across cultural and geographic distances? We argue that such a view represents a gross simplification of the reality, since every GBT member also represents the knowledge and interests of an organizational unit. Recognizing the broader strategic context within which teams are embedded, we advance a typology of GBTs. We argue that different types of GBTs impose different motivational structures on team members as well as different coordination challenges. We also examine how the salience and consequences of various emergent and designed team characteristics will differ across different types of GBTs.