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In this paper, we discuss a new information processing model of culture and leadership (Hanges, Lord, & Dickson, 2000). First, we review the older cognitive categorization approach that has been used to explain the relationships between culture, preferred leadership attributes and follower behavior. Then we present a new model based on the connectionist theory of information processing. This model focuses on the connections between concepts in a cognitive network, rather than discrete schemas. Finally, we use the new model to suggest strategies that managers might use to manage a diverse workforce.

This paper suggests that motives for engaging in affiliative‐promotive “helping” extra‐role behavior is related to cross‐cultural differences. The cultural dimensions of in‐group collectivism, uncertainty avoidance, performance orientation, and humane orientation, and their differential effect on helping extra‐role behavior in a diverse workforce are examined. Theoretical implications provide guidance for future empirical research in this area, and provide managers with more realistic expectations of employee performance in the workplace.

Managing a large multinational team such as the Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness (GLOBE) project (ongoing since the early 1990s) presents numerous leadership, communication and organization challenges. This chapter discusses the challenges that occurred in the GLOBE project owing to: (a) the long-term nature of the project, (b) the evolving (growing) size of the GLOBE team, (c) the large membership size of the GLOBE team, (d) the virtual nature of the team's communications, and (e) the cultural differences of the GLOBE participants. Survey responses from 50 researchers regarding their experiences in GLOBE help document our experiences. Because these challenges will be encountered by other multinational teams, we provide recommendations for forming and maintaining successful multinational teams.

In this chapter, we discuss Cohen and Doveh's (this volume) proposed protocol for testing differences in intra-class correlation coefficients (ICCs). We believe that there are many research questions that can be addressed by this procedure. We provide several potential examples of using this procedure at the individual, group, and organizational/society levels of analysis. We do, however, raise concerns about interpreting the ICC as an index of within-group homogeneity.

In this chapter, we propose that society- and organization-level social context cues influence the endorsement of ethical leadership. More specifically, we propose that certain organizational culture values provide proximal contextual cues that people use to form perceptions of the importance of ethical leadership. We further propose that specific societal culture values and societal corruption provide a set of more distal, yet salient, environmental cues about the importance of ethical leadership. Using data from Project GLOBE, we provide evidence that both proximal and distal contextual cues were related to perceptions of four dimensions of ethical leadership as important for effective leadership, including character/integrity, altruism, collective motivation, and encouragement.

Literature on leadership and literature on culture are each rich and deep, but the two were largely unrelated during the first several decades of their development. In more recent years, many researchers have explored relationships between these two literatures. In this chapter, we identify four developments or trends in the last 25 years of cross-cultural leadership literature. First, our understanding of etic or universal findings has advanced and become more complex, but also more realistic. Second, there has been refinement in the definition of “culture” and the identification of the dimensions of culture, with several researchers having identified particular cultural dimensions that seem to be directly relevant to leadership. Third, the social information processing literature has been extended to the leadership and culture literatures. Finally, there is a movement toward larger studies that not only collect data from multiple countries, but also through multiple research methodologies.