Developing Global Business Leaders: Policies, Processes, and Innovations

The widening gap between the requirements of multinational organizations and the strategic and managerial abilities of their leaders, many of whose core experiences predated the globalization of business, has created the need for this book. Editors Mark E. Mendenhall, Torsten M. Kühlmann, and Günter K. Stahl have organized the results of their research—and that of their colleagues in the fields of leadership development, international management, and organizational psychology—for the benefit of scholars and practitioners alike. After surveying current practices to bring the reader up to speed on global leadership development as pursued by the United States, Germany, Japan, and with regard to women in leadership positions, the book's focus shifts to a discussion of effective organizational processes. In the third and final section, contributors analyze the research that has been done on extending human resource management functional practices—such as selection instrumentation, the use of assessment centers, multinational work groups, cross-cultural training programs, and repatriation policies—to global leadership development.

The editors define and analyze global leadership and, in their review of the research, clarify exactly what we know and don't know about developing global leadership skills and what it might be profitable to learn. Practitioners will benefit from the contributors well-grounded insights into such issues as the key distinctions between global and domestic corporations, which dimensions of competency transcend internal corporate leadership dimensions, and how global leadership competencies should be developed.

Emphasizes the importance of acquiring and demonstrating global leadership competencies in today's fast-paced, multicultural business environment.

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In 15 studies that emerged from a small 1998 meeting in Thurnau, Germany, management specialists struggle with such questions as what global leadership is, what a global mind-set is, what can other academic fields reveal about those issues, and how global leadership skills can best be conceptualized and developed. They review the research to clarify what the field of global leadership does and does not know, and link existing knowledge about international human resource management to the concept of global leadership. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

MARK E. MENDENHALL is J. Burton Frierson Chair of Excellence in Business Leadership at the School of Business, University of Tennessee, Chattanooga.

TORSTEN M. KUHLMANN is Chair of Human Resource Management at the University of Bayreuth.

GUNTER K. STAHL is Assistant Professor of Human Resource Management and Leadership at the University of Bayreuth, Germany.