Cross-cultural leadership: leading around the world.

Situational models of leadership have been discussed since the mid-1960s. In this paper, we review the evidence concerning one such contextual variable, societal culture. The traditional cross-cultural literature shows how culture affects the kind of leadership characteristics, attributes, and behaviors desired and believed to be important in a society. The research also shows that culture moderates the outcomes resulting from different styles of leadership. The newly emerging global leadership literature focuses on leadership when followers are culturally diverse. We review the current state of these literatures and provide research suggestions.

Racial groups and test fairness, considering history and construct validity.

According to Helms, "test fairness" is defined as "removal from test scores of systematic variance attributable to experiences of racial or cultural socialization." Some of Helms's reasoning is based on earlier work, which recommended that racial group or category variables be replaced entirely with individual-level constructs, to reflect racial socialization experiences that vary within racial groups. Treatment of the test fairness issue--a social and political issue--will benefit from explicitly considering historical events that contributed to group-level race differences. In light of this history, D. A. Newman et al suggest (a) retaining a group-level conceptualization of race/racial socialization and also (b) focusing on criterion-irrelevant variance in test scores that is attributable to race.

When organizational climate is unambiguous, it is also strong.

Several recent studies have addressed the topic of climate strength--the degree to which there is agreement among an organization's members regarding the practices and policies as well as the shared values that characterize the organization. To further investigate antecedents of climate strength, the authors used data from the GLOBE Project, totaling 3,783 individuals from 123 organizations. The authors hypothesized that they would find greater climate strength in organizations with climates reflecting mechanistic as opposed to organic organizational forms. Although the authors did in fact find such a trend, they also unexpectedly uncovered significant and strong nonlinear effects, such that climates that are clearly mechanistic or clearly organic have strong climates, with weaker climates emerging for organizations with more ambiguous climates. These findings provide interesting new avenues to pursue in understanding the origins of climate strength.

Employment discrimination: the role of implicit attitudes, motivation, and a climate for racial bias.

This study is an attempt to replicate and extend research on employment discrimination by A. P. Brief and colleagues (A. P. Brief, J. Dietz, R. R. Cohen, S. D. Pugh, & J. B. Vaslow, 2000). More specifically, the authors attempted (a) to constructively replicate the prior finding that an explicit measure of modern racism would interact with a corporate climate for racial bias to predict discrimination in a hiring context and (b) to extend this finding through the measurement of implicit racist attitudes and motivation to control prejudice. Although the authors were unable to replicate the earlier interaction, they did illustrate that implicit racist attitudes interacted with a climate for racial bias to predict discrimination. Further, results partially illustrate that motivation to control prejudice moderates the relationship between explicit and implicit attitudes. Taken together, the findings illustrate the differences between implicit and explicit racial attitudes in predicting discriminatory behavior.

Which comes first: employee attitudes or organizational financial and market performance?

Employee attitude data from 35 companies over 8 years were analyzed at the organizational level of analysis against financial (return on assets; ROA) and market performance (earnings per share: EPS) data using lagged analyses permitting exploration of priority in likely causal ordering. Analyses revealed statistically significant and stable relationships across various time lags for 3 of 7 scales. Overall Job Satisfaction and Satisfaction With Security were predicted by ROA and EPS more strongly than the reverse (although some of the reverse relationships were also significant); Satisfaction With Pay suggested a more reciprocal relationship with ROA and EPS. The discussion of results provides a preliminary framework for understanding issues surrounding employee attitudes, high-performance work practices, and organizational financial and market performance.

Survivor reactions to reorganization: antecedents and consequences of procedural, interpersonal, and informational justice.

This study tested a model of survivor reactions to reorganization, which incorporated multiple predictors and consequences of procedural, interpersonal, and informational justice. The 3 justice types had different correlates: all 4 antecedents (employee input, victim support, implementation, and communication quality) predicted interpersonal fairness, implementation and communication quality were associated with informational fairness, and employee input was the sole predictor of procedural justice. Procedural justice was strongly related to all 4 outcome variables, and interpersonal and informational justice added unique variance to the prediction of trust in management. The reorganization effort was still predictive of employee outcomes, although primarily through procedural justice approximately I year after its completion.