Leadership in a Globalizing World: Addressing the Challenges

Abstract

What are the challenges a globalizing world poses for leadership studies? And how can we address them? The paper's central hypothesis is that a globalizing world will reshape our thinking about leadership substantially over the next decades. Global megatrends are currently rearranging reality with a truly amazing force. Leadership continues to make a huge difference in shaping the local outcomes of this process. From a leadership perspective, globalization creates a fascinating tension. There is a massive need for leadership in order to steer groups and organizations safely through a rapidly changing environment, but leading is actually getting vastly more difficult. The effectiveness of different types of tools or interventions - the economy of leadership - is changing. There are three main reasons: interdependence, complexity, and the obsolescence of established models. While the need for leadership is enormous, the people in positions of formal authority to whom we often look for leadership are not automatically positioned well to provide the necessary leadership. To analyze what globalization means for leadership and for leadership studies, the paper proceeds in three steps: First, by substantiating the claim that globalization affects leadership in any significant way. It is easy to point to many changes worldwide, but the task is to briefly identify a few salient linkages between global processes and leadership action. Second, providing some conceptual work, asking how leadership studies can theorize these changes in a meaningful way. What types of models do we have to develop to properly analyze leadership in a globalizing world and make useful prescriptions for practitioners? Third, to conclude, the paper argues that only by combining multiple lenses on leadership can we attain a perspective that is helpful for leaders who operate in settings in a fast-changing world. Rather than devoting our energy to attaining an elusive grand synthesis, we must sharpen the different lenses and find ways to teach them. In the past, leaders have often managed to evade complexity and nevertheless succeeded. But the economy of leadership is changing. To master the challenges of a globalizing world, leaders will have to get better at recognizing the value of different viewpoints.