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December, 1998 - Volume 3, Number 3
LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE: The Top Management Team
The third annual leadership conference sponsored by the Wharton Center
for Human Resources and the Center for Leadership and Change Management
will be held on May 13 at the Four Seasons Hotel in Philadelphia. The
conference theme is "Building the Top Management Team," and speakers will
include company executives, academic researchers, executive search firm
principals, management consultants, and business writers. If you are interested
in receiving the conference announcement please
e-mail us at lead@wharton.upenn.edu.
 Are
Leadership Capabilities Universal?
Wharton professor Robert House and more than 170 academic collaborators
worldwide have asked which leadership qualities transcend cultures and
which depend on the national setting. They have gathered survey data from
16,000 middle managers of 825 companies in 64 countries, ranging from
Albania to Zimbabwe. The companies are drawn from three industries --
financial services, food processing, and telecommunications -- and their
managers were asked to the evaluate whether a number of specific leadership
attributes and behaviors enhance or impede outstanding leadership in their
firm. The researchers find that:
- The universally attributed favorable leadership capabilities include
dynamism, decisiveness, and honesty; a capacity to motivate and negotiate
with others; and a focus on performance.
- The universally perceived unfavorable qualities include being autocratic,
egocentric, and irritable.
- Attributes and cultures that are highly regarded as essential for
leadership in some cultures but not others are ambition, formality,
risk-taking, and self-effacement.
- Country-by-country variations in the qualities viewed as essential
for leadership depend much of their national cultures. A high value
is placed on participative-leadership styles, for instance, in societies
that have a tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty, minimize differences
between people of varying ranks and social backgrounds, and stress personal
assertiveness.
Source: Robert J. House, Peter W. Dorfman, Paul J. Hanges, Mansour
Javidan, S. Antonio Ruiz-Quintanilla, Marcus Dickson, and 170 country
co-investigators, "Cultural Influences on Leadership and Organizations:
Project GLOBE," Advances in Global Leadership, Volume 1 (Greenwich,
Ct.: JAI Press, 1999, forthcoming). Robert House can be contacted at house@wharton.upenn.edu.
 Learning
from Literature
Robert Brawer earned a PhD in English literature and taught college English
before embarking on a management career that culminated in the chief executiveship
of a major apparel producer. Today, he finds enduring truths for management
and leadership in the classic works of English and American literature.
Brawer sees selling as an act of theater, in which the conjuring of images
and illusions can imbue an ordinary product with unique value to stand
out from a field of look-alikes. To illustrate this, he finds telling
example in Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (published in 1900),
in which a poor farm woman walks into a Chicago department store in search
of work. The departments, writes Dreiser, were "handsome, bustling, successful
affairs, with a host of clerks and a swarm of patrons. Carrie passed along
the busy aisles, much affected by the remarkable displays of trinkets,
dress goods, stationery, and jewelry. Each separate counter was a show
place of dazzling interest and attraction. She could not help feeling
the claim of each trinket and valuable upon her personally...."
A lesson is also to be found in Sloan Wilson's 1956 novel, The Man
in the Grey Flannel Suit, in which rising manager Tom Rath slowly
develops an awareness of distinct identity that is the precondition for
making a difference: "I really don't know what I was looking for when
I got back from the war, but it seemed as though all I could see was a
lot of bright young men in grey flannel suits rushing around New York
in a frantic parade to nowhere. They seemed to me to be pursuing neither
ideals nor happiness -- they were pursuing a routine. For a long while
I thought I was on the side lines watching the parade, and it was quite
a shock to glance down and see that I too was wearing a grey flannel suit."
Finally, Brawer draws his own conclusions from examination of a Captain
MacWhirr in Joseph Conrad's 1901 short story, "Typhoon." With 200 passengers
onboard his ship, MacWhirr pilots his vessel through a terrible storm
in the South China Sea. In his actions Brawer finds an exemplar of substance
over form: "The hero of Conrad's novel is a most unprepossessing man.
His self-effacing, undemonstrative nature runs contrary to the stereotypical
image of the imposing, take-charge chief executive officer. By representing
him as a colorless man who disappoints our expectations, Conrad underscores
the importance of those inner characteristics that 'image' alone cannot
convey, but that emerge when untoward circumstances call them forth."
"The fiction of business are indispensable to us," Brawer concludes,
"because it is the business of fiction to recreate the world we know,
or think we know, to make us see it -- and ourselves -- with new eyes."
Source: Robert A. Brawer, Fictions of Business: Insights on
Management from Great Literature (New York: Wiley, 1998).
AWARDS FOR BEST ARTICLES ON LEADERSHIP: Center
for Creative Leadership
The Center for Creative Leadership sponsors three awards for research
and writing on leadership:
- Kenneth E. Clark Research Award for the best paper by an undergraduate
student.
- Kenneth E. Clark Research Award for the best paper by a graduate student.
- Walter F. Ulmer, Jr. Applied Research Award for the best field research
study.
The awards include a prize of $1,500 and a trip to the Center for Creative
Leadership in Greensboro, North Carolina, to present the papers in a colloquium.
The deadline for the student paper is August 27, and for the research
study, April 2. Information can be obtained from Cynthia McCauley at mccauley@leaders.ccl.org.
Management Congress in Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico
Seminarium of Santiago, Chile, and Wharton Executive Education are presenting
a "Management Congress" in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Mexico City during
the week of June 28-July 2, and in Bogota, Colombia, during the week of
September 27-October 1. The five-day program is presented in English with
simultaneous Spanish translation, and it focuses on recent developments
and best practices among leading companies worldwide in five management
areas: strategy formulation, human resources, decision making, technology
management, and leadership development. Information on the program can
be obtained from Rafael Rodriguez of Seminarium at rafael@seminarium.cl
and Ray Del Bianco at Raymond.DelBianco@wharton.upenn.edu.
 In
a 1998 interview, the chief executive of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries observed:
"I have always said that Mitsubishi management values jobs before profit....
We don't give a hoot about things like return on equity.... it is essential
that our business practices take social effects into consideration. That's
why I openly brag that I don't cater to shareholders."
Source: Marina Whitman, New World, New Rules (Boston: Harvard
Business School Press, forthcoming in March, 1999).
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