ABSTRACT
We introduce the reader to the ideas of Hofstede, Trompenaars and Hamden-Turner, as well as GLOBE’s House and colleagues, who collectively help provide a system by which to understand culture. While many readers may be more familiar with the work of Dr. Geert Hofstede, Hofstede himself acknowledged that his classic system only accounted for about 49 percent of cultural differences between countries. 2 Additional factors explain the other roughly 50 percent of a country’s culture, and it is our belief that GLOBE and Trompenaars provide some of these additional factors and thus help us further explain all the variation among cultures. Consequently, these three sources provide us a working system, first for understanding culture as systematically as modern research allows; secondly for understanding the effects of culture on leadership; and, finally, to peer into the world of behavioral psychology to add depth and sophistication to our analysis of cross-cultural leadership.
