“The Elusive, yet Critical Challenge of Developing Global Leaders” - Mark E. Mendenhall

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18 Terms

1
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Who is the author of the text? What is he a specialist of?

Mark E. Mendenhall is an American academic, a specialist of international human resource management, who was one of the first to study the challenges of global leadership. He has experienced first-hand living abroad and advised many multinational companies.

2
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What is the source of the text? Briefly describe its characteristics.

This article was published in the European Management Journal, which is a high-profile international academic publication issued six times a year, covering the various spheres of management

3
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What is the title of the text? What can you guess from it about the author’s thesis?

The article is entitled “The Elusive, yet Critical Challenge of Developing Global Leaders”.

The term “elusive” shows that the author argues that training global leaders is a difficult task, because of the problems it raises, while at the same time stressing its crucial importance with the adjective “critical”.

Thus, the author thinks that research focusing on how to train global leaders is worth undertaking because its findings are beneficial for companies

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What is the author’s point of view? Does he seem to be in agreement with other specialists? 1

Mendenhall claims that the practical application by companies of researchers’ findings on global leadership has blurred the way the concept should be understood and created confusion (p.423).

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What is the author’s point of view? Does he seem to be in agreement with other specialists? 2

However, he insists that research on the subject should not be dismissed (just like Y. Baruch) but should instead focus on specific aspects to help companies make their global leader training programs more efficient, by defining precisely what skills should be developed, how their acquisition should be gauged, how they can be taught, and what contexts will help global managers to put their training in practice (conclusion p.428).

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What is the author’s point of view? Does he seem to be in agreement with other specialists? 3

 “Elusive”  the concept of global leaders has become blurred, which seems to be coherent with what Y. Baruch was stressing but while Baruch insisted there was no ‘perfect recipe’ for making a global manager, Mendenhall is suggesting ways of improving the training of global leaders.

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What is the author’s point of view? Does he seem to be in agreement with other specialists?

  • Leaders V.S. managers => Mendenhall uses the phrase “global leaders”, while Baruch referred to “global managers”

  • “leaders” => less specific, broader term

  • Managers = an official post = derived from the verb to manage => they coordinate the team that they are in charge of to make sure they fulfil their objectives, they execute their mission and fit in the company’s corporate culture.

  • Leaders = more vague, not an official role in the company. Leaders are individuals supposed to be endowed with a vision and personal qualities that make their subordinates want to follow them. The implication is that they are extraordinary individuals so their subordinates are bound to admire them.

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What are his main arguments? Use the connectors to identify the logic in his demonstration.

Premise of the article: companies’ training programs for global leaders are inefficient because there is

too much confusion surrounding the concept of global leaders

 However, this does not mean research on the subject is vain, but that it should be made more relevant

by focusing on specific guidelines to make training programs more efficient.

 He identifies four main points:

- Pinpointing the skills required and ordering them from the most basic to the most advanced

- Assessing the mastery of these skills

- Improving how these skills are taught

- Finding the best contexts to put these skills in practice

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What is the goal of the article? What are the authors trying to achieve?

The main goal of the article is to help companies improve the way they train their managers in order to develop the particular skills required to work in an increasingly globalised environment. In this sense, the main goal of the article is prescriptive, it is aimed at providing guidelines for companies in order to help them increase their business performance.

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What sort of story do the first paragraphs tell? Why? What is the point of this strategy? Why is the end of the story not revealed at that point?

The first and middle paragraphs of the article tell a personal anecdote, based on the author’s experience. The author sets the scene by giving details about when he was working in Japan, training managers on Japanese culture

The point of the personal anecdote is to illustrate the author’s thesis. This strategy is called inductive reasoning, starting from a particular example and drawing conclusions that have a broader, more general application

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cording to the author, what was the problem in the approach undertaken by most firms in the training of their global leaders?

 These trainings were inefficient because they were based on an understanding of global manager that was not precise enough, since it was mainly defined by companies themselves, encompassing too many variables associated with productivity assessment, and dependent on the individual views and prejudices of the senior executives organising the training (p.423 2nd column).

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What was the useful contribution of the author’s 2002 collaborative work with Osland? What were its limitations?

They identified a set of 53 skills involved in global leadership, narrowed down to six wider categories, or “core

dimensions”:

- Relationship  how to interact with people from other cultures

- Dispositions  how much individuals will naturally tend to go toward the unknown

- Business expertise  knowledge of the company and of the global context

- Organising expertise  practical skills to manage a team

- Cognition  developing a global mindset

- Visioning  vision of the direction a company should take, of a company’s best interests in the long term, and

convincing others to follow

 The author stresses that the main flaw of their work was that they did not determine their relative significance

and the order in which these skills should be learnt

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. How is the author improving on his 2002 work in this article?

Mendenhall therefore combines the conclusions of his previous work and those of the ION team of scholars to create a new model summarised in Figure 2.

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Describe figure 2 and explain how it works

Figure 2 is a pyramid ranking the different groups of skills by order of importance and order in which they should be learnt  The model is to be read from the bottom up and from left to right following the arrows.

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What is the role of time in the training process of global leaders?

Global leader training should be thought of as a process, as opposed to a one-off event (seminar taking place over a week). This means it takes a long time, several months or years, during which the relevant skills have to be assimilated and then put into practice in different environments.

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What should be the long-term effect of a successful global leader training on the individuals involved?

It should be a deeply transformative process, involving far-reaching personal change = “fundamental human transformation” (= not just gaining new skills, becoming a different person)

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What is the point of coaching global leaders compared to a more classic sort of training?

The point of personal coaching is illustrated through the personal anecdote and the following

paragraphs. Personal coaching is adapted to individuals, it focuses on a single’s person experience and

needs, unlike a training which is given to a group, and is therefore more general.

 It is also centred on present experience, what the individual is going through in real time, unlike a

training which is geared towards the future and is necessarily very wide-ranging to provide for many

different situations that may or may not arise.

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Why should companies follow the author’s recommendations?

According to the author, companies would benefit from following his recommendations : they would avoid facing problems linked to cultural misunderstandings, (like the Coca-Cola story), and would be able to seize opportunities to cement new deals in other countries (personal anecdote). This would in turn translate into financial gains since it would avoid losing revenues due to mismanagement, and increasing commercial opportunities.