2.1 Culture
Culture is an important component for our research. As our research question centers on generalizability of leadership behavior in a cross-cultural environment, it becomes imperative to understand and have a clear perspective of the meaning of culture under such circumstances. We want to use the definition of culture provided by Geert Hofstede (2011) in the article titled “Dimensionalzing Cultures: The Hofstede Model in Context” where culture is defined as “culture is the collective programming of the minds which distinguishes the members of one group or society from those of others”. Managing people belonging to different cultures will quickly become a difficult task if one is inept with lack of perspective of what culture means
In the article titled “Defining the “global” in global leadership” (Mark E. Mendenhall, B. Sebastian Reiche, Allen Bird and Joyce S. Osland, pp. 7, 2012), the authors reflect this problem of lack of a precise definition of the term (GL) by referring to a sample that contain over a dozen of definitions of GL that have been applied by researcher sand scholars (Mendenhall et. al., p. 6-7,
They refer to globalization as “a manifestation of complexity” (Mendenhall & bird, p. 6, 2013). Furthermore, the authors contend that if one can grasp and understand the processes that are imperative to deal with “complexity”, you will be suited to understand “globalization”. Complexity can further more be divided into four other dimensions or facets that are part of this dimension, and that continuously interact with each other, and they are multiplicity, interdependence, ambiguity and flux. The table below will showcase what these “facets” in the aforementioned dimension