Global Leadership Mindset and Workforce Engagement in Nonprofit Organizations

TLDR: This article found that the exercise of follower-oriented behaviors manifested through servant and transformational leadership dimensions coupled with global mindset orientation had an important effect on the engagement levels of nonprofit volunteers and employees.

Abstract: This study surveyed 136 employees and volunteers from 21 nonprofit organizations in Southern California to assess the interaction of global mindset and leadership characteristics on workforce engagement. Global mindset refers to the capacity of being culturally aware, keeping an open mind toward ethnic differences, trends, and markets, while having the ability to observe cross-cultural commonalities. The study revealed that the exercise of follower-oriented behaviors manifested through servant and transformational leadership dimensions coupled with global mindset orientation had an important effect on the engagement levels of nonprofit volunteers and employees. Although we hypothesized that both follower-oriented dimensions would have a statistically significant positive mediational effect on workforce engagement in nonprofit organizations, our findings showed that the transformational leadership dimension actually had a suppressing effect on global mindset. This might be due to the universal applicability ascribed to transformational leadership (Bass 1997), which might have offset the potential additional effects of global mindset. On the other hand, the significant mediational positive effect of the servant dimensions led to reinforce Patterson, Dannhauser, and Stone’s argument (2007) about the merits of leadership based on global mindset and servant characteristics, such as altruism and humility, in order to increase workforce engagement among volunteers and employees in local nonprofit organizations.