Knowledge Network: Faculty & Research

Global managers who thrive in foreign environments are hard to find. They are also easy to lose, Thunderbird Dean of Research and Garvin Distinguished Professor Mansour Javidan, Ph.D., told business school executives Nov. 14 as the keynote speaker at the MBA Roundtable in Washington.

That’s because the same passion for diversity that makes these global managers attractive to international organizations also makes them restless and hard to pin down.

“The people who have high levels of global mindset are always attracted to diversity, new opportunities and new challenges,” Javidan told the audience, which included representatives from about 65 business schools in the United States, Canada and Europe. “They enjoy working with people from different parts of the world and traveling to different parts of the world.”

Unfortunately, Javidan said, companies that go out of their way to recruit and develop managers with these traits often turn around and stifle them with sameness. These companies confine their high-potential global leaders to a desk in one location, surround them by people resistant to change, and assign them to boring caretaker projects.

The results are predictable.

“If individuals with high levels of global mindset feel like they aren’t given opportunities that are exciting to them, they get bored and lose their interest in the company,” Javidan said. “Very soon they leave.”

Javidan has spent more than two decades studying effective global leadership, which he defines as the ability to influence people from different backgrounds and cultures. He spoke at the MBA Roundtable about the Global Mindset Inventory, a survey of 91 questions that Javidan developed with other researchers at Thunderbird School of Global Management in Glendale, Ariz.

This scientific self-assessment measures an individual’s global mindset and identifies areas that need improvement. A 360-degree version of the instrument, which combines self-assessment with peer assessment, also can alert global companies about the need to stimulate and challenge managers with high levels of global mindset.

People in this category would include Gerald Schafer, one of the global leaders that Javidan encountered during his research. Schafer is a Swiss national who has never really lived in Switzerland.

He was born in Budapest to a Swiss father and Hungarian mother. He grew up in Africa and South America and studied in the United States. He speaks Portuguese at home with his Brazilian wife, and is also fluent in Spanish, French, German, English and
Hungarian.

Javidan said people like Schafer are rare. Most people grow up in one culture with one national identity, one religious identity and one ethnic identity.

He said this is why companies need to cling to their global talent once they find these people.

“Every company has some type of global ambition,” Javidan said. “CEOs worry about the shortage of global leaders. They also need to worry about retaining the global leaders they already have in their organizations.”

Is a global mindset in your DNA?
Thunderbird has created psychometric tool that is changing how global businesses compete. Learn more about the Global Mindset Leadership Institute or contact the project leader, Thunderbird Dean of Research Mansour Javidan, Ph.D., at mansour.javidan@thunderbird.edu.

Posted: 11|26|08 at 12:14 pm.
Filed under: Global Leadership, Global Mindset, Global Talent, Javidan, Mansour.
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