Overview

As the speed of globalization increases, as companies become flatter, as firms engage in temporary organizations from joint ventures to alliances, and as more business is conducted with virtual teams, there is a need for effective and efficient cross-cultural leadership. It is common today to have virtual teams working in numerous countries from many different personal, societal, and business cultures. Experience gave a glimpse of a pattern of cross-cultural leadership attributes that were accepted and recognized globally (etic): trust, empathy, power, communication and transformation. Starting with a definition of leadership and culture, the work was undertaken to explore, exegetically, the vast literature on leadership and culture, to synthesize it and correlate it to experience and other studies, and to test the validity of the cross-cultural leadership intelligence (XLQ) model that emerged. The definition of cross-cultural leadership we developed is the ability to inspire the desire to follow, and to inspire achievement beyond expectations.