Ranked #1 in the World
Loading ...
Thunderbird graduates make significant gains in global business savvy and other key attributes that predict success overseas, new research from the school’s Global Mindset Institute shows.
“We now have a scientific way to measure learning outcomes,” says Thunderbird Professor Mansour Javidan, Ph.D., the school’s dean of research and head of the institute. “We show a clear and significant improvement in the scores of our graduating students.”
Results come from the Global Mindset Inventory (GMI), a scientific self-assessment tool developed at Thunderbird School of Global Management in Glendale, Arizona. Starting in 2008, Thunderbird has used the instrument as a pre- and post-test to measure students’ capacity to succeed in complex, cross-cultural business environments.
Multinational companies, social sector organizations and other academic institutions also use the self-assessment tool to help global managers and students identify their strengths and weaknesses.
Data from the pre- and post-test at Thunderbird show:
– Thunderbird students start above the corporate benchmark in psychological capital, which refers to a person’s passion for diversity, quest for adventure and self-assurance.
– By the time they graduate, Thunderbird students outperform the corporate benchmark in all aspects of global mindset.
– Thunderbird students show a 26 percent increase in interpersonal impact, a component of social capital.
– Thunderbird students make the biggest gains in global business savvy, a component of intellectual capital. Students show a 66 percent increase in global business savvy, and a 29 percent increase overall in intellectual capital.
“What we end up with,” Javidan says, “is a pure scientific comparison of pre- and post.”
The high scores in psychological capital among incoming students do not surprise Thunderbird Dean and Chief Academic Officer David Bowen, Ph.D., also a researcher at the Global Mindset Institute.
Bowen says more than half of Thunderbird students come from outside the United States, and many live and work in multiple countries before arriving on campus.
“We are a community of global citizens,” he says. “We are proud of the fact that we attract global citizens in the first place.”
Measuring success
Javidan says the Global Mindset Inventory, a survey of 76 questions, is the first of its kind designed to help global managers identify their strengths and weaknesses before venturing onto the world stage.
“Don’t get me wrong,” he says. “There are many instruments out there. A lot of people will tell you they have instruments that can assess global leaders, and we looked at them. None of them takes a rigorous, empirical, scientific approach.”
The Global Mindset Inventory does.
Javidan says the journey that led to the breakthrough started in the early 1990s with a multiyear, multiphase project called GLOBE, which stands for Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness. He and other researchers set out to understand the cultures of the world and determine what it takes to be an outstanding leader in 62 societies on every continent.
The ongoing GLOBE project has documented huge differences.
“The world that the typical global leader has to deal with is full of bumps, full of differences and full of cultural challenges,” Javidan says. “The question that came to our mind was, ‘What is special about those global leaders who are successful?’”
When Javidan came to Thunderbird in 2004, he decided to pursue answers to that question. He and his research team started talking to managers and academics all over the world.
“We were just listening at first, absorbing all of this information,” Javidan says. “We ended up with thousands of pages of transcripts from our interviews, and we have three full days of videos.”
Afterward, the Thunderbird researchers started putting together a draft instrument that gradually evolved into the Global Mindset Inventory.
Javidan says individual scores are kept confidential, which eliminates any motivation for test takers to embellish their strengths or hide their weaknesses.
“We are not going to make any judgment on anyone,” he says. “All we are trying to do is to figure out more efficient and more effective ways of helping managers become more successful global leaders.”
Thunderbird promise
The team’s research indentified three main components of global mindset.
Psychological capital refers to a person’s capacity to thrive in unfamiliar environments. Social capital refers to a person’s ability to develop global connections with people from diverse backgrounds. And intellectual capital refers to a person’s knowledge of global business practices and cultures.
Javidan says most students come to Thunderbird to build social and intellectual capital, and the Global Mindset Inventory helps measure the school’s ability to deliver on this promise.
Students lag behind the corporate benchmark in intellectual capital when they arrive but quickly gain ground. By the time they graduate, Thunderbird students score 21 percent higher than the benchmark in intellectual capital.
Graduates finish 15 percent higher than the benchmark in social capital.
The benchmark is based on Global Mindset Inventory results from more than 6,600 global managers. More than half of these test takers come from outside the United States.
“We are ecstatic with the results,” says Thunderbird Professor Mary Teagarden, Ph.D., another researcher at the Global Mindset Institute. “The pre- and post-test holds the school accountable and measures our ability to deliver on the Thunderbird promise.”
Other institutions that use the Thunderbird instrument to measure academic outcomes in global mindset include FIA Business School in Brazil; the University of Victoria in Canada; Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico; Zayed University in the United Arab Emirates; and Georgetown University, Indiana Tech and the University of Denver in the United States.
Is a global mindset in your DNA?
Thunderbird has created a psychometric tool that is changing how global businesses compete. Learn more about the Global Mindset Institute or contact the project leader, Thunderbird Dean of Research Mansour Javidan, Ph.D., at mansour.javidan@thunderbird.edu.
Leave a Reply