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talking management

This is Karl Moore of the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University with Talking Management for The Globe and Mail. Today I am delighted to be in Vancouver sitting down with Neal Ashkanasy from the University of Queensland.

For a global manager who has transferred from one country to another, in the course of a career, it helps to understand what are some of the dominant ways of leading in those particular countries, I assume?

ASHKANASY - It more than helps, it is essential. If expatriate leaders don't have an understanding of the local culture, they don't have to necessarily speak the language for that to happen, but they do need to do their homework to figure out these dimensions.

You'll find this in the G.L.O.B.E. study, it is easy to google it and look up some of the results but don't google "globe", google the whole name which is Global Organizational Behaviour and Leadership Effectiveness.

MOORE – When you think about it, the G.L.O.B.E. study would look at Australia and see certain tendencies as Australians, but not every Australian manager is alike?

ASHKANASY - Absolutely. One of the criticisms of these studies is that they do tend to treat people across cultures as similar. One of the things the G.L.O.B.E. study did is that it identified different cultures within the same countries.

Francophone Canada is assumed to be a different population to Anglophone Canada, similar with Belgium, black and white in South Africa.

So we actually looked at particular groupings within one culture, but naturally it goes further than that and our next projects are actually going to be looking at an even finer division of populations. That's where we are going next.

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