Global Leadership

About: Global Leadership is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 1598 publications have been published within this topic receiving 29200 citations.

Developing global leaders through building cultural self-awareness

Abstract: A growing body of literature on global leadership acknowledges the importance of intercultural competencies, but has yet to address the fundamental role of implicitly learned cultural beliefs on global leader development. This article introduces cultural self-awareness as a mechanism that applies an explicit mode of learning based in social cognitive theory to the implicitly learned aspects of culture. Cultural self-awareness is the ability to identify personal beliefs and values that are sourced from one’s cultural upbringing and to recognise the influence of this cultural conditioning on behaviour. Building cultural self-awareness can facilitate the development of intercultural competencies in global leaders through a process of examining the source of personal cultural beliefs and values, identifying the tendency to use personal beliefs as a reference for evaluating others, and recognising how specific cultural beliefs shape leadership behavioural responses.

The Evolution of Global Politics

Abstract: The rise and decline of world powers has attracted much scholarly attention in recent years. The theory of long cycles answers parsimoniously the question: why, in the past half millenium, have Portugal, the Dutch Republic, Britain (twice), and the United States risen to global leadership while others have failed to do so? This accounts for the success, or failure, of individual states, but to explain the entire sequence we need to employ an evolutionary paradigm that proposes that each of these long cycles is one mechanism in a spectrum of global evolutionary processes. The leadership succession is an intermediate stage in the evolution og global politics, whose next likely major phase, reaching a high point later in the 21st century, will be the gradual absorption of the informal role of global leadership, when embedded in a democratic community, into a network of more formal positions within an emerging global organization of a federalist character. The conditions of that process can now be specified.

Research on Islamic Banking in Malaysia: A Guide for Future Directions

Abstract: Although not a near equivalent of conventional banking in terms of size, the global Islamic banking industry has grown at a very rapid pace in the last three decades. Malaysia has been at the forefront of this development since early 1980s and has earned a reputation of a global hub for Islamic banking. Since its inception, much research has been carried out in this area but there is no systematic documentation of research findings in Islamic banking, though much focus has been on aspects of efficiency and performance vis-a-vis the conventional counterparts. This warrants our relooking at the research – both theoretical and empirical – in different areas of Islamic banking in Malaysia, as to provide a road-map for the structured long-term development of the industry in consonance with the country’s global leadership position in Islamic banking. This paper surveys and analyses the published works on Islamic banking in Malaysia with the goals of evaluating their contribution and usefulness to various stakeholders and charting the future directions for research that could sustain Malaysia’s global leadership position in Islamic banking.

The United Kingdom: a record of leadership under threat

Abstract: Introduction The UK’s engagement with the issue of climate change has been rather paradoxical. On the one hand it has been widely regarded as a global leader, both in terms of its international diplomatic effort and its domestic performance on greenhouse gas emission (GHGE) reduction (IEEP 2006). The UK reached its effort-sharing target under the EU’s Kyoto Protocol emission reduction commitment ahead of schedule, and went on to over-deliver – one of only a handful of EU-15 member states to do so (EEA 2013). To help achieve this, it deployed several innovative policy instruments, such as emissions trading. Internationally, the UK has shown entrepreneurial leadership, principally during the Rio and Kyoto climate summits, and when chairing the G8 and acting in its Presidency of the EU. The celebrated Stern Review of the economics of climate change (Stern 2006) and decades of scientific research offer evidence of cognitive leadership. With the adoption of the 2008 Climate Change Act, the UK was widely lauded as the first country to enshrine in law carbon emission reduction targets – of up to 80 per cent by 2050 – with a view to removing policy from the vagaries of the issue attention cycle. The same Act also heralded wide-reaching five-yearly climate change risk assessments, to inform a rolling national programme of adaptation to climate impacts, confirming the UK as a leader in that domain as well. And yet the emission reductions achieved during the 1990s were to a large extent a fortuitous by-product of unrelated energy policy reforms (Kerr 2007). In the 2000s, CO2 emissions started to rise again, and a unilateral 1997 commitment to reduce them by 20 per cent by 2010 was quietly dropped. Moreover, it is questionable whether any politician in the UK has fully grasped the enormity of the challenge of radically decarbonising the national energy system in just over a generation, widely regarded as necessary to avoid the worst effects of climate change. Finally, the UK remains in many respects ‘critically unprepared’ to adapt to predicted climate impacts (EAC 2015). In this chapter we outline the history of the UK’s response to climate change, tracing the waxing and waning of leadership in the face of vested interests, economic and financial pressures, concerns over energy security and, latterly, agrowing degree of ‘luke-warmism’ over the seriousness of the problem (Ridley 2015). The overall story is one of repeated attempts by policy entrepreneurs in governments of both right and left to ‘join-up’ government to deliver deeper emission cuts, but a rather piecemeal and often incoherent introduction of new policy instruments. In other words, the ability of governments to lead a lowcarbon transition has been rather more fitful and halting than the UK’s international reputation might suggest.

The Character of Global Leaders

Abstract: Getting global leadership right is a huge challenge for companies. Having the right leaders has an impact on not only employee attitudes towards globalization but also their engagement levels and approach to working with colleagues across borders. Because of physical distance, language, and cultural differences global leaders face a huge challenge of generating and maintaining trust throughout the organization. The keystone of trust is the character of global leaders. In this chapter, we discuss our research on the role of character in global leadership. In particular we address the challenges of demonstrating character with a particular emphasis on maintaining integrity and connecting with people with different cultural norms and expectations.