Recent Research: Dimensions of an Individual Global Mindset

Successful companies are forced to change business strategies as market realities shift. It happens all of the time. Browse the business section of your local bookstore and you'll see dozens of titles preaching the need for companies to adopt, adapt and innovate. The continuing restructuring of the U.S. durable manufacturing sector, as alluded to in the Useful Stats piece below, is a vivid example of the importance of abandoning old mindsets for industry: change or die.

Play a quick word association game ending with the word "bureaucracy," and it's pretty likely you didn't associate the word with flexibility, adaptability, innovative or any synonyms for these. Changing philosophies within government is a slow, arduous task. It typically takes a catastrophic event - such as a deep recession, natural disaster or change of political leadership in the legislative and executive branches of government - before many real changes have a chance of being enacted. The final report of Washington's Global Competitiveness Council (see article above) is intended, in part, to help change the individual mindsets of the state's change makers -- industry leaders, politicians, educators and the general public. Whether or not it worked remains to be seen.

A fundamental element of most technology-based economic development is to encourage people in businesses, government and universities to change the status quo in their thinking. How one affects a change in mindset for most contributing members of a community is a challenge - one that, quite frankly, few regions have truly achieved. Add the complexities of a global economy to the mix and the task moves from a mere challenge to downright daunting.

For years, elements of the environmental movement have carried a slogan of "Think Globally, Act Locally" on bumper stickers, books and magazine tag lines. As globalization issues move increasingly to center stage, the struggle of defining what an individual global mindset actually comprises and how it plays out in a person's decisions and actions becomes more important.

A new working paper from the Netherlands, Dimensions of an Individual Global Mindset, attempts to describe or define how globalization can be enveloped or embraced within the individual mindset of a person. In this case, it is the individual global mindsets of 15 global leaders of three multinational companies under the microscope.

One of the challenges globalization presents to the U.S. political structure is the declining importance or ties of economies to specific places or political jurisdictions. Multinational corporations, a phrase that not too long ago seemed reserved for the world's largest firms, can apply equally these days to most large businesses and many mid-sized manufacturers as well. As the flow of money, human capital and knowledge is increasingly more fluid across borders, companies take on a global character, transnational mentality or global mindset. Successful corporate leaders do as well, according to Dimensions authors Wim dn Dekker, Paul G.W. Jensen, and Claartje J. Vinkenburg. "Individuals must develop this cross-border and cross-cultural ways of thinking in order to simultaneously integrate global efficiency and local responsiveness to their own work," they say.

The majority of the paper discusses the evolution of academic thinking on the global leader, the essential qualities of a global leader and important differences between a global leader and an expatriate leader. A fundamental characteristic of the individual global mindset, the authors contend, is a positive attitude or outlook on the effects of globalization on the world and local markets. Balancing between global markets and local responsibilities was identified as one of the more significant problems to confront global leaders, the survey found.

In addition, there was "unanimity among respondents on inspiring and motivating employees with many different cultural backgrounds being the most important new cultural element" of their jobs. That cultural awareness also plays into the global leaders perceiving themselves as having an "openness to the world," as perceiving the "world as a global village."  These individuals also perceive themselves as cosmopolitan. They "appreciate their own cultural roots or country" but love to live and work abroad, like to travel and "put work and life experience into a broader framework."

The authors also asked questions to discern how an individual global mindset affects desired outcomes of these corporate leaders. All respondents said they have an intention of staying in their global role; roughly half plan to move abroad. "A major constraint for global leaders to pursue their career abroad is their family situation." Demographic factors, then, will likely play a role in developing an individual global mindset.

While the authors caution drawing too many conclusions from such a limited sample (15 interviews), the importance of developing an understanding of the unique attributes of the individual as well as corporate global mindset should not be lost on state and regional technology-based economic developers as they revise their TBED strategies to reflect a global economy.

Dimensions of an Individual Global Mindset is available at: http://ideas.repec.org/p/dgr/vuarem/2005-14.html