IMOA: Evolution and Critique of Global Leadership Studies

 

(IMOA) Imagine Pacific Original Article 

Evolution and Critique of Global Leadership Studies

By James E. Faumuina, MBA, MPA 
Ph.D. Student Troy Global Leadership Program     

6/2/2024

Before reading "From cross-cultural Management to Global Leadership: Evolution and Adaptation" by Bird and Mendenhall (2016), my appreciation of global leadership was based on my limited perception of international studies and business management. This could be attributed to how it was portrayed and publicized. As Bird and Mendenhall (2016) pointed out, the literature in the 1950s was published in journals like the Journal of International Business Studies and Thunderbird International Business Review (p. 116). Their ability to contextualize the phenomenological process that evolved into global leadership was a principal strength of the article. This is evident when they stated, "emphasis will be on how a changing context and evolving phenomena brought us to where we are in the study of global leadership" (Bird & Mendenhall, 2016, p. 115).

If this approach had a weakness, it could be how the authors open themselves up to criteria bias by placing value on job and task specifics and less on the importance of competency. The value of having a recognized credential should not outweigh the significance of the new burgeoning global leadership discipline. However, as the authors noted, in global leadership, they "adopted a job analytic approach, seeking first to identify the requirements of the tasks of global leaders and then analyzed what knowledge, skills, and abilities were critical to effective job performance" (p. 122). The decision to use this approach could be seen as intentional bias, whereas in some conventional methods outside of global leadership, it is the opposite, using competency or credentialed status as the first value criteria.

Suppose Harris's supposition (2022) holds. In that case, a critique of the application of scholarly evidence is welcomed, as academics should be expected to "invite future researchers to conduct additional studies that might corroborate or challenge their results" (p. 89). Though it is not my intention to challenge how both authors relied on opinion to validate the field of Global Leadership (Bird & Mendenhall, 2016), I presume that, given the probable constraints of historical evidence in the field, Harris (2022) provides that social scientists are "doing the best they can" (p. 92). As a novice scholar, I appreciate how Harris offers an alibi for the constraints of research and the reality of expectations when the author wrote, "Most researchers cannot truly test every theoretical notion they might want to" (p. 93). Awareness of these constraints is necessary, as He states, "perfection is a high standard" (p. 94). In pursuit of it, alternate research methods, such as cross-sectional collection, become useful when, as I presume was the case with Global Leadership, there is a lack of longitudinal evidence (Harris, 2022).

James is the owner of Imagine Pacific Enterprises and the Editor of Imagine Pacific Pulse (IMPULSE). He is a retired Lt Col, Hawaii Air National Guard. Former medical administrator, planner, program manager, and operations officer. Graduated from the USAF Air War College and is currently a Ph.D. student in the in Troy Global Leadership Program. He can be contacted at jfaumuina@troy.edu 

References

Bird, A., & Mendenhall, M.E. (2016). From cross-cultural management to global leadership: Evolution and adaptation. Journal of World Business, 51(1), 115-126. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jwb.2015.10.005

Harris, S. R. (2022). How to critique journal articles in the social sciences (2nd ed.). Waveland Press, Inc. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781071878743