Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior

Table of Contents

Introduction
Process of Global leadership
Issues related with global leadership
Conclusion
Reference

Introduction

The article which has been selected for this particular topic is titled Global leaders are team players written by Dr. Martha L. Maznevski & Joseph J. DiStefano.

Martha L. Maznevski is an Assistant Professor of Commerce at the McIntire School.

Of Commerce, University of Virginia, where she teaches Organizational Behavior and Joseph J. Distefano is Professor of Organizational Behavior and International Management at the International Institute for Management Development (IMD).

Process of Global leadership

The articles main theme relates the significance of global teams and how they play their part in this global business environment. It also throws light on how global leaders emerge in the limelight and how they can make a huge difference in the organizations goal achievement.

Today is the era of globalization and intensified competition the concept of global teams has emerged. Global teams are teams of managers from different departments of the organization working together to achieve some specific goals that are assigned to them which are global in capacity.

As the global environment keep on changing, the global leaders must develop a strong set of conceptual, technical and analytical skills for managing the most complex situations that the team can face. The global team provides an ideal platform in which organizations future leaders get a chance of developing themselves and their skills also get improve (Maznevski & DiStefano, 2000).

The authors have identified three steps that are needed to be followed by the global leadership for team effectiveness includes Mapping, Bridging & Integrating.

The first step which is needed to be followed in this regard is the development of the global environment knowledge. This also includes the learning about different cultures, their economical and political situation. Mapping is all about learning and adapting to the current situation. The reason why this step is very crucial is that learning to communicate effectively with peers from other part of the world cultures provides a strong foundation of team building. The second step is bridging this requires frequent information exchange among members. Bridging also helps in developing skills in managing uncertainty. This is the third and final step in which the team is more comfortable with each other in sharing ideas and communicating with each other, which eventually leads to better performance and achievement of goals.

Apart from that the biggest problem that arises is that, the global teams are expensive in nature as compared to the local teams. They are difficult to manage because of the diversity in backgrounds of all the team members.

DiStefano believes that the most essential feature which needs to be identified to maximize both the team performance and global leadership are that all the leaders must have extensive knowledge about the business; also they must have strong functional knowledge in other areas as well apart from their own specialized area.

Secondly the global leaders must focus on some key areas that are identified as adapting to the current situation, maintaining relationships and managing ambiguity. These areas become more important for the global leaders because the global environment is very dynamic and requires quick thinking and decision making. Finally conceptual skills must be very strong for the leaders to deal with the complexities and ambiguities that come in the way.

Agreeing to the facts that are presented by the authors it could be analyzed that despite all the issues that are faced by the global team, research shows that the global teams success is difficult but not impossible. If proper measures are taken and the team is lead in a good way the desired results can be achieved.

According to the author proper training facilities should be provided to the team members who are lacking in certain areas. As global team members are coming from different backgrounds with different skill set, in the initial stages it is difficult for them to gel in and perform accordingly, but with the passage of time things start to get better and better.

In this regard the communication process is very important. This is one area which can make or break the whole situation. If the communication process is progressive in nature chances are that most of the hurdles that comes in the way would be eliminated through communication.

Conclusion

Overall the article presents the importance of global leadership in an organization. Also as a matter of fact most of the multinationals organizations have designed such teams and they rely on them to make important strategic decisions on behalf of the organization. But on the same side there are some issues regarding the global teams which are mainly identified as expensive, time consuming and difficult to manage. But on the larger run if one can foresee the outcome that are generated by these teams then the issues wont remain issues.