IHRM #6 - Sebastian Reiche - How Global Leaders Advance Organizational Goals

Well, warm welcome to our 6th event in our IHRM webinar series. My name is Maja Vidović. I'm an assistant teaching professor of HRM at Penn State's Bay State University Center for International HR Studies. I will be the moderator for today's webinar. This webinar series has been organizing— organized through collaboration of 3 institutions across the globe, which is in line with the topic of the webinar, the internationalization. So the first institution is the Center for Global Workforce Strategy at Simon Fraser University in Canada, with Mila Lazaro being our main dynamo that gets our team focused, organized. Thanks, Mila. And Edna Kwan, also from SFU. The second university institution here is the Penn State Center for International Human Research Studies from the US, which is represented by Elaine Farandale, our director, Miguel Olivas, and myself. And finally, the third institution is the ESCP Business School in Europe, and we have Maral Muradbetkova and Marian Festing. Joining us from, from different cities in Europe. Thank you, guys. Okay, the webinar series, how it initially started, well, it was just like a quick response to the pandemic and our inability to travel, share good ideas in the area of HRM. But this quickly grew into events that attract hundreds of live attendees like today, and we actually get further several, several hundred views after the event because all the webinars are currently available on our YouTube channel, so feel free to use those for your classes, just general inspiration, maybe during your commute, or maybe not because we're not commuting these days. Hopefully we're going to get there soon. So there's going to be a link in chat, feel free to use that. Please subscribe, that's going to give us the option to actually change the name of the channel into something other than a series of numbers and letters. Okay, so on to today's topic. Today we're going to tackle the topic of how do global leaders advance organizational goals. And I'm really excited because today we're joined by Sebastian Reiche. He's professor of people management at ESA Business School in Barcelona, in Spain. Well, Sebastian's passion— he's passionate about global work and global leadership and knowledge transfer. His work has appeared in leading scholarly outlets which include a long list. I'm going to say just a couple of the cool names, such as Academy of Management Discoveries, Academy of Management Journal, Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of Management Studies, Organization Science, Personnel Psychology, and the list actually goes on. And he even includes publishers such as Routledge and Sage. Impressive. Um, but also Sebastian's thoughts have been featured in international press, which include The Economist, Financial Times, BBC Capital, Forbes. Finally, he also uses an outlet that can seem slightly more attainable to majority of us for sure, but it's nonetheless intimidating because he regularly blogs on the topic of global work. If you're curious about that, and I spent most of the evening actually reading his regular posts from March, beginning of March, Feel free to check it out. The link should be available in chat. Okay, before we dive in, a couple of housekeeping. Please be aware the chat has been disabled for you as attendees. If you have questions, please use the Q&A option to post the questions. Once again, for some reason we have technical glitch and some of you appear as Edna Kwan. Well, we know that you're not your name. When you use the Q&A option, please write what your name is so that we know who we're talking to. We will have time after Sebastian's talk to address the questions, so feel free to help us navigate the discussion. And just another reminder, reminder before we start, you came here for inspiration, for some tickling curiosity, so enjoy. Sit back in some comfy chair, take a deep breath in, deep breath out, let go of all your worries, problems. There's going to be time to do that. And for now, just enjoy. Sebastian, thank you so much once again for being with us here today. The floor is yours.

Thank you very much for this very nice introduction, Maya. Wow, so we're all relaxed. And it's even more exciting to be talking about something that I'm passionate about, that we're all passionate about, which is research. And so I'm, first of all, just to say I'm really honored to be invited, to be with you, and to be part of this very distinguished group of those who have already contributed and those who are still to contribute in this webinar series. And so what I thought, what I wanted to do in this talk today was to very briefly talk about my broader research, but then zoom in on one empirical study that's hot off the press, and that's just out so I can give you a flavor of what I'm currently working on, and that's something that's very close to my heart. And so if you will, in a nutshell, over the last 15, 18 years, I've been studying how global work works, which obviously at the moment is very timely because over the next few years, I think we'll be rethinking how global work should work given the context. And so if you look at the international HRM and global mobility literature, which really has been my home, for this time. What we've seen over the past years is that we've actually seen an increasing fragmentation of different ways of slicing global work. In fact, as a field, you could say that we've probably become a bit too enthusiastic of finding ever new terms of how we should label assignees or global professionals. And then, in fact, with Mila Lazareva and Carolyn Clegg, we've been We've been doing recently a review chapter on expatriation, so we've looked at the literature again, and so if you look at the theories that have been used, different predictors of explaining global mobility consequences, then you actually see that the field has advanced a lot. Okay, so we have more theories, more predictors, more consequences. If at all, again, there's probably too many theories out there, and what we need is more theoretical integration. So that field has advanced a lot. The same cannot be said about the domain of global leadership, which is very much related, right? Not every expatriate or assignee is a global leader, not every global leader is an assignee, but there's a lot of overlap, obviously. But when you look at that literature, this is much less charted territory. It's theoretically much less developed, we know much less about predicted outcomes. I'll very briefly plug this with Mark Mentenau, Joyce Ausland, and Bettina Skrullerik, where we're editing an annual on advancing global leadership, and this year we were focusing on global leadership effectiveness for the very reason that we actually don't know very much how we should measure global leadership effectiveness, just as one example. And very importantly, we also actually don't know what we mean when we talk about global leaders. I'm teaching at institution where there's a lot of executive education. I teach very regularly modules on global leadership. So the second line of research, if you will, has actually been driven a lot out of the classroom for me. And even though I or my colleagues and I, we tend to, or we try to convince our participants that many of them are global leaders, when you actually talk to these participants, they're unsure, mainly because, well, we don't actually know what global leaders are. This construct of global leadership is fairly elusive. And to start us off, I'd like to give you a few examples just to illustrate that. There's no polls, okay, no test, just a bit of self-reflection. We're all relaxed. So let's have a look at a few pictures and see whether you actually know these people and whether you think these are global leaders. Here's one person. Do you know this executive? This is Safra Katz, CEO of Oracle Corporation, originally Israeli, based in the US, bicultural, and is heading Oracle. Here's another example. Do you know this one? I've tried to come up with slightly different examples. If you look at the literature we've, in the past, always been reusing the same role models. This is Ajay Banga, executive chairman of Mastercard, born and raised in India, and similarly, now based in the US, a bicultural, based in two different cultures. So these would be prototypical global leaders. But when you ask someone, what's a global leader, these would be executives you would mention typically. Here's another example. And now it might get a bit more difficult. Do you know this one? For those of you who don't follow football, this is the coach of football club Liverpool, Jürgen Klopp, a German compatriot. Liverpool hasn't been going very well, but they've been winning in the Champions League just last night against a German team, ironically. Is Jürgen Klopp a global leader? Well, if you conceive global leadership as a social influence process across constituents from different cultures, well, then arguably he would be a global leader, right? He's managing a high-performance international, very diverse team. So yes, he would be a global leader as well. And just to finish up with the last example, you will not know this person. This is unnamed Norwegian Red Cross volunteer based in Turkey helping Syrian refugees. Is she a global leader? Well, yes, again, she's influencing across context. She's based in different jurisdiction, she has to do with different stakeholders. So if you will, these are all global leaders, but if you were to lump them together as scholars and measure them, put them into your sample, or put them to leadership development program, you'd be comparing apples and oranges. So these are very, very different roles. And so what we've been doing a few years back was essentially to try to clarify a bit what we actually mean by global leaders by categorizing and theorizing about different global leadership roles. So this was a piece that I've done with Joyce Ostlund, Mark Magnol, and Alan Byrd. And so we focused essentially on two dimensions of the context that global leaders operate in, task complexity and relationship complexity. This comes from the leadership literature that has traditionally always differentiated between a task domain and the relationship domain as leaders. And then we essentially very briefly characterize those in terms of two different factors. So task complexity is a function of the variety of different elements. This could be different customers, different competitors, different languages, different cultures you're operating in. And flux, which is the dynamics or the change of those elements, And then relationship complexity is essentially the range of boundaries in your stakeholder interactions that you have as a global leader. It could be physical boundaries or identity-based boundaries, and also the interdependence between different stakeholders that you're interacting with as a leader. And so based on this idea, we've come up with, well, this typology of 4 ideotypical global leadership roles that are a function of high and low levels of relationship and task complexity in the context that global leaders face. And we believe that that has enabled us at least to make a bit more sense of different global leaders. So these different archetypical roles come with different role behaviors. I won't go into detail here. This is a GIPS piece that's published already. It comes with example roles. And using this typology, you might also categorize Jürgen Klopp, the football coach of Liverpool, and the Red Cross volunteer a bit better. Klopp, the coach, might be more in a connective role. The task, playing football, is probably very similar, that doesn't change, but you have to interact very intensely with your team, with high-performing team. The Red Cross volunteer is working in projects, highly changing projects all the time. So this is maybe a bit more operational. And then you have senior executives, which tend to combine both high relationship and task complexity. And so moving from conceptualizations to empirics, my colleagues at all, Neely and I, essentially wanted to understand one particular globalization role, which, which are the senior executives, these integrated global leaders who have high relationship and high task complexity, and essentially just like the international HRM global mobility literature has done, develop more theory, understand better predictors of global leadership, and some of the salient outcomes and consequences of global leadership. And so that's exactly what I'll talk about in the rest of the talk. This is an empirical piece that's forthcoming now in Academy of Management, journal. And here, essentially, we were interested in studying how globally is advanced organizational goals. We adopted a multi-method study, so we focused both on qualitative and quantitative data, and then we combined those. And we took a power lens or power perspective to that paper. My institution where I teach, ESA, is a proponent of the traditional case method. As you can imagine, we've been grappling with how do you actually replicate that in an online virtual context. We're in the middle of this. But so since we use case methods, case method teaching a lot, I'll start out with a decision-making dilemma of the type that we would use in class as well, which is the following. Imagine you're an American executive and you're responsible for the Chinese market. And so there's a major contract for you to be gained. The only thing that you're still missing is the signature. And so as you're about to contact the client to secure the signature and finish the— finalize the deal, you realize that the client has left for vacation. Your Chinese client has left, is on vacation for a few weeks. And so what do you do? You consider to courier the contract to the client's vacation home so you can get the signature and finalize the contract, which is something you would do back in the US. But your local Chinese team actually advises you strongly against this. They think this might be perceived as an invasion of privacy, and they think that this might jeopardize the business relationship. You, of course, are nervous. This is a major contract, um, and just leaving it hanging there when you can just go and get the signature seems very risky. And so the question is, what would you do? Would you go and get the signature, or would you defer to your team's judgment and wait? And this dilemma very well captures the type of issues that we, we wanted to study, which is As a global leader, when you're responsible for operating in a context in which you lack expertise, you lack influence networks, do you follow your trusted and tested tried approaches that you would be effective in your home context, or would you actually follow the local team in the foreign context and follow their advice and their judgment? And so ultimately, this is a question of how you use and draw on your positional power, because you are hierarchically higher, you can oppose your approach. The question is, you have the choice to choose to oppose or to defer. And so positional power is something that's very common to organizational life. Positional power is essentially the right to command, to evaluate, and to direct subordinates. By mere function of your hierarchical position, your structure rank, if you will. And organizations essentially rely on position power for their performance. We know from research, for example, that people work better if one is dominant, the other is submissive, because this helps to resolve misunderstandings, conflicts. It also helps collaboration. And this behavior that essentially constitutes or reinforces this position between dominance and submission is deference. And deference, in very simple terms, is the tendency to submit to others. And we know from research, essentially the power literature for decades has assumed that deference usually is upward flowing. So for example, research tells us that when you address someone of higher hierarchical rank, you tend to speak of lower volume, you tend to use more polite language. But the question is, there may actually be situations where deference or upward-flowing deference may have to reverse and flow, flow downwards. For example, if you are a leader in a context where you're lacking expertise, where you're lacking influence, where you're lacking the networks, where you're deeply unfamiliar with the surroundings, how can you make decisions if you don't have that input and this expertise and that experience? And so this set of behaviors that captures this reversal of upward-following deference is what we call downward deference. And downward deference, defined, is essentially practice of lowering oneself to be equal to lower-power individuals. So we're not talking about, talking about completely reversing hierarchical relationships, but essentially is making you more on, on, on the same level. Okay, so you're diminishing your own power to be more equal to those lower-ranking individuals. And before I go on, I should probably say what downward deference is not, because obviously whenever you introduce a somewhat novel concept, your responsibility is to show how this is different from what's already around. If you look at the literature on power and control, there's obviously one literature in corporate practice which is less hierarchical organizing, okay? And over the last decade, we've seen organizations experimenting with holacracy, with organization democracy. We've seen increasing use of self-managed teams. But these, these, all these approaches essentially have in common that they are structural approaches, they're organizational structural approaches, whereas downward deference really is, is a, is an individual, it's a voluntary discretionary leadership behavior. It's not structural, something that, that you as a leader may choose or choose not to do. And there's obviously a large literature on, on delegation, on empowerment How is downward difference different from those? Well, if you look at the delegation literature, if you look at the practice of delegation, leaders or managers tend to delegate those aspects, those decisions that are not critical, and maintain or keep those critically important decisions for themselves. And the same with empowerment, you're actually handing something over rather than actually connecting. Whereas with downward deference, it's, it's, it's, it's the other way around. Downward deference really is deferring to your local team when it comes to strategically important decisions so you can advance organizational goals in a better way. Now, downward deference might be particularly important, um, when you don't have sufficient expertise to make decisions, and we know from the knowledge-based, or knowledge-based work literature, that people with power don't always have enough expertise, or the full expertise, to make decisions to solve problems. And as workers are getting more complex, we're actually experiencing this even more. So the question is then, how do those with positional power actually deal with the lack of expertise? How do they go about this? And the literature actually gives competing very different explanations of how this is solved by leaders or those with power. We know on the one hand that there's examples that individuals may in fact subvert hierarchy, they may in fact defer to lower-ranking individuals. If you look at the literature on employee voice, for example, we know that leaders may encourage their employees to speak up with ideas, with new approaches. So there's some evidence there. But if you look at the social psychology literature on power, there's an assumption that those with power essentially want to maintain their power. And we know from previous research that, for example, powerful individuals tend to discount advice from experts. McGee and Smith developed a whole theory on power and social distance, which essentially shows why and how those with power tend to maintain or even increase social distance to those with lower power. And if you go to the organizational theory in the sociology literature, then equally what you find is that managers and organizations more broadly tend to try to wrest control from experts. So in short, when you look at the conceptual and the political literature, we have actually very different explanations for how individuals with positional power might deal with a lack of expertise. And so we wanted to address this in the context of global leadership with three interrelated research questions. The first question is, why and under which conditions do those with position power actually defer to lower-ranking individuals, right? Again, this is a voluntary— it's a discretionary behavior, so why would you do this? And to the extent that someone would in fact enact downward deference, what's the set of behaviors that individuals would adopt to practice downward deference? And then the third question we were particularly interested because the social psychology literature has very much focused on maintaining social distance between those with power and those with less power. So we want to understand what role does social distance play to enact downward deference. And as I mentioned earlier, we addressed this with a multi-method study. Our research context was a company that we call World Tech. And this is a large technology consulting firm headquartered in the US, but essentially spread across the globe. And the company adopted years back already a global strategy where they, where they essentially located most of the employees and leaders outside of the US in order to staff international client projects very, very flexibly and to be able to react to, to, to customer requests very fast. So essentially most leaders had where it was common for leaders to operate in contexts where they had less experience than their original home context. If you will, this company actually was a very hierarchical, top-down, directive type of organization. So this is probably more of an extreme case within which to study downward deference behaviors, just for you to keep in mind. And so what we did in this company, in World Tech, was to essentially interview 115 of their global leaders. And again, these are global leaders with high levels of task and relationship complexity. These are very senior leaders that were within 4 levels of the CEO position. They were all based in a non-native region. Some of them were responsible for a whole region, such as Southeast Asia. Others had a business unit responsibility for Americas, for example. So very, very high-level positions. And they were all long-term veterans in the companies. On average, they had been with the company for 22 years. They knew the company, and they were essentially socialized in a very directive type of control, use of position power environment. And they came from very different countries. So these are not US leaders. These are leaders from China, Korea, from Italy, Spain, Germany, Brazil, all sorts of different backgrounds. And then we were lucky enough to get access to archival data from the company, and we were able to look at job performance ratings in two consecutive periods. We also looked at the internal career promotion, career advancement of these leaders, and then we had a bunch of other demographic variables that we had access to for a random and representative subset of these leaders. So World Tech did not give us— open all their books, but we had data for 61 of those global leaders. Which we then used for correlational analysis to complement our qualitative data. So the first thing that we did essentially was to compare leaders who enacted downward deference and those who did not. And as we went through the data, we followed typical qualitative interview coding techniques as we coded our data. We very quickly realized that downward deference was actually a very binary category. So those leaders who enacted downward deference had materially different views of how you would lead, what your ideal path to success would be. And so 49 of these 115 leaders enacted downward deference, the other 66 did not. And so just to give you— and what I'll do over the next few minutes is just to give you a couple of example quotes to enrich and give you a bit more flavor of what these leaders told us as we asked them about their leadership styles, and be able to compare a bit in contrast. And so here are two examples of leaders who enacted downward deference. Here's one Chinese leader, for example, who puts this quite nicely when he said, well, instead of giving direction, you have to change. You have to listen to people who are closer to the client. Closer to where particular demands are. And the Brazilian leader, here's a second example, I like that quote very much, who said, well, let's actually invert jobs. It's not that you work for me, I work for you. I need to learn from you. I need to defer to you, to your judgment, to be able to advance goals. At the same time, those leaders who did not enact downward deference, we realized, had a much more traditional command and control approach to leadership unfettered by cultural differences, for example. So here's one example also of a Brazilian leader, a different Brazilian leader, who said, well, I don't adjust my leadership style by the market. I'll succeed in my role based on my leadership style and my execution. There might be some adjustment, but essentially the core will be the same. This is what's made me successful. And I've picked two different Brazilian leaders here just to show that as we were cycling through our coding, our data analysis, we didn't find any differences between culture of origin. So whether you're from Brazil did not— it didn't matter whether you were from which country you were in terms of whether you were enacting, or more likely enact a downward difference or not. Okay, so as we had established these differences, in the first step we wanted to understand, well, why what drives leaders to enact downward deference in the first place. And here we looked at a range of demographic variables, correlates of downward deference, and what materialized essentially was measures related to their previous international experience. And here we followed conceptualizations that look at a previous experience in terms of the breadth or the depth. So breadth you could conceive of as a number of countries, people have lived— foreign countries people have lived— these leaders have lived in before. And depth is more related to the time you've spent. So here we code the time in terms of the month, the total month, in context where they've spent more than 3 months at a time. And then we also looked at the novelty or richness or distinctness of the foreign context they've lived in before. And so we looked at 2 different measures based on Hofstede and Ronenchenko. And what we found is that indeed, those leaders who displayed downward deference were significantly more likely to have deep, radical previous experiences in foreign contexts. So in terms of time, for example, these leaders had spent almost 3 times as many months abroad in foreign assignments than those who did not. So it seems to be that depth of previous international experience really drives whether or not you're going to display downward deference. And then in the second step, we wanted to understand the set of behaviors that makes up double difference. And again, here we have two dimensions, two theoretical dimensions that each consist of three sets of behaviors. The first focuses on reducing perceived social distance. Social distance is essentially the degree of intimacy and understanding in a relationship. So one example of a behavior was around making a personal link, building a personal link to your local team. And so this US leader, for example, mentions how important it is to know the background of local supporters of the local team so he can make a personal connection, so he can better motivate your local team to achieve objectives. A second behavior related to earning trust, This quote here focuses on a Brazilian leader in Korea. Would the Korean team put you in front of a Korean client with the risk of you messing up that relationship? They're only going to do this if they actually trust you, if they see that you can add value to them. So the importance of earning trust, and by doing this, actually reducing a social distance to your team. And the last dimension had to do with working collaboratively on the same level. And like this, uh, what this leader here says, well, this is about we're in the same boat, we work shoulder to shoulder, we work side by side so we can deliver better results. So again, this is very much being more on eye level. And the second dimension of downward deference behaviors had to do with yielding to subordinates' expertise This was about, on one hand, privileging subordinates' judgment. So this Chinese leader here put this quite nicely when he said, well, this is deferring to your local team's judgment. It's almost like sacrificing something of yourself. Essentially, you need to relinquish familiar behaviors that you would have adopted in your home context and defer to the local team that has a better grasp of how things work in the local context. Then there were behaviors around actually transferring influence, explicitly understanding how your local subordinates want to solve a specific issue, so you're on the same level. You can learn as a result from this as well, but you're actually transferring and listening to how your local team would solve and make a decision, solve an issue. And the last dimension had to do with conforming to social standards locally.. And these had to do with organizational hierarchy expectations, but also very importantly about hierarchy expectations around demographic factors such as age and gender. And so the need to applying a different leadership style as a result of this process of conforming to social standards. And the last question that we wanted to address was, well, so what? Now that we've established that there is such thing as downward deference, does this matter In the opening vignette that I mentioned, where this American executive in China, this executive ultimately waited until the client returned from vacation, and then secured the signature and secured the deal. But do we have a bit more tangible evidence that downward deference actually makes a difference? And here we focused on some performance data. We measured job performance of these leaders, of these 61, of the subset of the global leaders.. And these job performance ratings were essentially tied to growth and financial goals that these leaders had. Recall that these were very, very senior leaders, right? And then also we were able to look at the number of progressions to executive ranks. So we essentially measured from the level just before, just below executive ranks, how many promotions these leaders had made over their career. Again, these leaders were in the company for a very long time., and we looked at those up to 3 years after the interviews, so we could see continuity. And we found that indeed those leaders who displayed downward deference were more successful, had high performance ratings, and also advanced more in their career. So tying this together, based on our qualitative and quantitative data, we were able to say something about the conditions, the behaviors, and outcomes of downward deference. The conditions essentially is leaders' realization that they had less expertise, less networks, less net influence relative to their local subordinates, which made them engage in downward deference. And the conditional, the when, the moderating factor here really was whether they had this deep disorienting international previous experience in foreign contexts, and that made them more likely to do so. I've talked about the two sets of behaviors,, and then also the tangible outcomes of downward deference. So we will— here's a bit of theory around downward deference for the context of global leadership. Let me finish with a few contributions of the study, and then we'll have time for questions as well, and I'm curious to hear your reactions. One set of contributions relate to the power literature, If you follow— if you read social psychology-based theories of power, then again there's an assumption that the deference flows upwards and that leaders essentially try to maintain or even increase social distance. Scholars and research has shown that leaders do this to be able to exploit the position to entrench themselves and maintain, maintain power ultimately. But we're actually showing that these leaders learned based on their disorienting their previous experiences that social distance might actually be detrimental. It might impair their capacity to judge and to accomplish work goals. So it actually goes against those typical theories. And when you go to sociological explanations of power, they traditionally conceive power as the opposite to dependence. You're actually trying to entrench and exploit your position to avoid dependence. But again, the leaders that we looked at essentially actively sought dependence they sought reliance on their subordinates as a relational strategy to reduce this asymmetry between positional power and expertise. And I think we're contributing, we're expanding the power literature from that perspective. There's a set of contributions to HRM and international HRM as well. One thing that I've been curious to see over many different studies me and many, many colleagues have done is, these mixed findings of how important actually previous international experience is for adjustment and performance of expatriates, international assignees. There might be different, many different reasons for why we don't find this, but what our study tends to, tends to show is that this deep non-native experience might not necessarily have a direct effect, but more of an indirect effect with secondary benefits. These leaders, based on their learning from this deep non-native experience, might have learned to engage in downward deference, and as a result, reach their benefits by actually leveraging their teams. You might say, well, downward deference is very instrumental. Yes, it is, ultimately, because these leaders got ahead. They were more successful. But if you think about how they've done that, they've done this in a much more developmental way. So downward deference is not only instrumental, it is also communal.. But these leaders have been grooming their local team, they've been helping developing them, and I think that's a very important behavioral repertoire that organizations can tap into in their global talent selection decisions, staffing decisions, career decisions. Dave Collins and colleagues have written about some of this extensively, right, think about pivotal positions, so you could actually think about for which positions downward deference might be particularly important to advance global organizational goals. And then finally, you don't necessarily have to be a global leader to enact downward deference. Think about situations where you're lacking expertise, you have junior functional specialists or tech-savvy millennial talent. Downward deference might actually help you to benefit and leverage that talent as well. And then finally, a few implications for practice and also business education. We've experienced, and I think we're experiencing it even more currently, is that work, especially global work, has become increasingly complex. And what we've actually seen is that organizations are pushing leadership responsibilities much further down the organizational hierarchy and distribute leadership responsibilities. And so how organizations essentially have dealt with this is to complement this with less hierarchical forms of coordination control. There's normative approaches to values, culture, and structural approaches. I've talked about them already earlier. But I think there's also a need for more discretionary acts by leaders themselves, because many leaders don't have leeway enough or influence enough to actually change organizational structure. Double deference is a voluntary leadership behavior that you can enact in as, as an individual leader, and important to develop in leadership development. We have an interesting challenge of how we're going to continue to design foreign emerging experiences in business schools, but increasingly we've sent students abroad and then on these immersion trips, which obviously have not happened during COVID Let's see how they're going to happen in the future. Same for leadership development. Our results essentially tell us that we need to keep doing this, because it's those radical, right, on-the-ground experiences that help you to learn why downward deference might be important. And then finally, if you link this to remote work, when the lockdown initially started last year, we've talked a lot about social distancing. Well, this is actually about physical distancing, right? And actually, leaders reducing social distance is actually a way to overcome physical distance, whether you're sitting a block away or on a different continent. And I think this is an important behavior that leaders will have to refine and learn to be able to be more effective in a remote context. And with this, let me stop here and hand back over to Maja, and I'll be curious to hear Any questions? Thank you very much for your attention, for listening in, and happy to answer any questions and then discuss.

Yes, thanks, Sebastian. This was really an interesting talk, and I love how you kind of brought us through. First, you showed us the photos, got us thinking, and then later when you showed us the framework, it was like, oh yeah, I know who can be put in there. That's a smart move. Thank you. One question that I got was, where is the kind of majority of the work coming from that you were talking about? And I know you were referencing a paper, so maybe just quickly tell us which one it is, and maybe we can post it in chat so that people can search for it later on.

So the initial one was a JIPS piece on this contextualizing leadership. The 2017 one with a typology, right? And then, and this study here is forthcoming, so this is not yet published, but it's online, it's available advance online, and hopefully out at some point this year.

Yes. Okay, good, good. Thank you, and congratulations on that one.

Thank you.

Okay, so diving in, there's been many questions in Q&A, so I'm hoping you're not looking at those, not distracted. Getting distracted. I would like to get— yeah, yeah, with the most basic ones. They're mostly related around the culture, but first to get it clear, what's the difference between servant style and the downward deference leadership styles? So just to kind of clear it out.

Okay, and yes, and so this is a good question. There's humble leadership, there's servant leadership, and servant leadership essentially is primarily focused on on serving others, whereas downward deference initially at least is instrumental. These leaders have learned based on their previous experience that it's important to defer. So the initial trigger is an instrumental one, and the secondary benefit essentially is one that's closer to servant leadership, is communal, however you want to call this. But yes, and if you look at the concept space of servant leadership, it touches on some of those other dimensions that we would argue downward deference does not.

Yeah, and then another really cool question that was being kind of— it goes together with it, and I'm sorry I can't tell you who posted it because I'm not seeing the names for some of the—

lots of ethnics.

Yes, lots of ethnics. So the question is, is downward deference sometimes or ever seen as patronizing, maybe?

So this is a very good question, and partly because what we did in this study was to focus on leaders. And so we interviewed these leaders, and when we approached them, we essentially wanted to understand how they go about leading, what's their leadership style, and they were reflecting about their past experience. So this was essentially narrative. But we haven't talked about, and we haven't studied the recipients, the subordinates. And so that's a good question. So how do recipients perceive downward deference? And it's a good point, so maybe sometimes they might be seeing this as patronizing. In fact, we currently, we have a working paper, a follow-up study on this one where we exactly address the second part of the puzzle, which is we're actually focusing on the subordinates, on the recipients. We have this again in a global context, and what we actually find is that the reactions to downward deference are not monolithic. So they are clearly different, and what we actually find is that there's two different groups of people who react very differently, and some have a very positive response to this and others a very negative, because it might actually— sometimes you feel you're actually being stepped on your own toe. So yes, very good point. So I think there's a lot more to be understood, but I think in a nutshell, fully agree this is probably not monolithic and we probably need to understand under which conditions this is also perceived as positive by subordinates. And there might be cultural factors, right? So one question we've often received, again, we haven't found this in our study in terms of whether leaders, their origin, their heritage would make you more or less likely to engage in double deference. People have said, well, if you're coming from a higher power distance culture, would you less likely do this? And again, based on the 115 leaders that we had, this is inductive research, I have to be careful in terms of what I can claim here or not. At least we have not found any evidence, that doesn't mean that there is none, but my hunch would also be that how this is perceived, there would be a cultural driver there, and it'd be very interesting to look at those, right, how people perceive that.

Yeah, and you actually tackled right into the question that actually comes from Natalia Fey from Hanken Finland. So she's actually kind of drawing attention to, and then you just answered the question, is the cultural background of global leaders affected, affecting the downward difference? And actually she's asking if you have maybe measured the cultural intelligence of your global leaders. As you say, you did measure something, but what did you measure?

Yes, so we did not measure cultural intelligence. Essentially what we So I guess you can take it out of the narratives that they had. So those who had been more experienced, who have learned, you would assume have taken something out of these assignments otherwise, but still the question is whether we have not measured their meta-learning, so we don't know. I guess in our context, the organization that we've looked at, these are leaders that have been with this company for 22 years. And there's a big chunk of research showing that as an organization, with your organization culture, you can actually supersede national culture. If you've been socialized in a particular organizational context, your national culture may actually play less of a role. And I actually personally find this very interesting. We have a lot of organization examples that are explicitly going against your national culture and creating management systems that try to buffer or weaken that. And I would argue these are long-term veterans, 22 years on average. They're probably more socialized within the company context rather than— and they all have been global leaders for a long time, rather than being representatives of their original culture. So again, I'm not saying that there's no cultural effects, it's just that we haven't picked them up. And for the very senior group of executives, maybe that is less relevant. It'd be very interesting to look at how this pans out in lower levels of leaders.

Yeah, that's interesting. You mentioned a little bit about the kind of the context of the leader, but thinking a bit more about, again, the recipient and the culture that you're going into, there's a question in Q&A that says, how much is downward deference applicable in countries with high power distance? —then again—

Yeah, no, again, it's very interesting. So I think just like in an organization, you can supersede national culture through the system and the organization culture you're creating. I think in your team, you can do the same thing. In fact, I think a big learning that we're taking out of working in— now we're all forced to work in global virtual teams. We'll probably see this even more post-COVID, is that you have to create some kind of common culture in your teams to connect dispersed individuals. And by doing this, I think you can create something that goes against people's national culture. So as you're joining the team, you're leaving your culture of origin at the door, and you pick it up again as you go home. And so yes, you would see differences, and I think it would be— I think this would be one study that needs to be done, is to see how high-power distance cultures would perceive downward deference differently, and I'm sure you'd be picking that up. But I think the challenge as a leader, if you wanted to— if you've seen that this is useful and you want to maintain this, and again, the leaders that we've looked at, many of them were actually in Asian countries, and we don't have the data, the in-depth data on the mechanisms What we know is that somehow they've been getting the work done, right? They were more successful, at least perceived by their supervisors, by their superiors, right? But it'd be fascinating to look at those particularities and this deeper texture.

I agree. Yes. Going a bit back towards kind of the profile of people who use it or would not be using it, I have a follow-up. You have greetings from Christian. He was the one asking about the patronizing part, and he thanks you for the answer. But there is another piece coming in. Was there much difference between genders and ages, maybe, for people that were high in this difference?

In fact, we had reviewers who were asking us a lot about gender, because there's this interesting finding that especially if you're comparing instrumental or agentic and communal approaches, you see this, for example, in research and delegation, that actually delegation is more difficult for female leaders because recipients, those who are being delegated, might be seeing delegation as more agentic, meaning you're delegating to get stuff off your plate rather than doing it to develop. So there is clearly a gender component which would be interesting to look at. In our sample, which was fairly diverse, we did not find any differences which again, is not to say that there are none. I think that would be really interesting. And based on the delegation literature, you would assume that this might be— that might be the case. In terms of age, they were actually fairly similar. So we don't have enough variation there to be able to say— again, this is inductive, so I have to be careful in terms of— we haven't run regressions. But the age was actually fairly similar. Similarly, senior, similarly in terms of age and career stage.

Those are also interesting topics, and it just opens up a whole lot of topics to explore further.

Sorry, obviously it is interesting. So, if you look at the leader, him or herself, with that idea that downward deference might be perceived differently, is it more communal, seen as communal or agentic versus communal developing? This might actually mean that you need to work harder as a leader to have your team see the benefits of downward deference, and it not being seen as patronizing or as just self-centered, self-interested. I think that's a very important component. And maybe you realizing where you have to work harder to achieve this. Yeah, true.

And again, I'm not sure if you're going through the questions, because you're always tying in—

No, I have not opened them.

And don't.

Honestly, we have so many questions. I'm following you. I'm following your lead. You're doing this so well with the questions, so you're filtering, so I'll leave this to you.

Yeah, I actually have to apologize because we're not going to be able to get to all the questions. So I was already thinking maybe we can open like a chat after the YouTube channel, then just post some of the answers over there.

But— Exactly, obviously if anyone wants to reach out, by all means, so I'm more than happy to address them.

Yeah, we'll still have all those questions. We can give them to you and you if you can find an outlet, maybe blog about some of those. Sounds good, sounds good. Okay, one more question. It says, so how is this idea of downward difference in leadership behavior maybe applied in work in various contexts? So we're assuming in some cases, the leaders are expecting to influence others due to their expertise-based authority, or so how do these things work together?

So obviously, in a context where where the leader brings particular expertise, this would be less relevant. So if this is about technical expertise, and the leader has that expertise, the leader doesn't face that dilemma. Now, expertise is not only technical, there's social expertise, actually how do you, in this example that I mentioned, how do you, it's almost a social knowledge of managing the client. I might know how to secure the contract, but I don't know how to go about this in that particular client context. But in many cases, and traditionally that's what the literature has assumed, that position of power and expertise map. If that's the case, then downward deference is not an issue. But I think we're facing more and more contexts where the leader just— it's not feasible. First of all, work is becoming more complex. It's not feasible for the leader to do all this him or herself, let alone have all the expertise to solve problems. And so in this context, the question is, who would be the person you could rely on more? How do you actually do this? And back to the discussion we've just had, how do you do this in a way that's perceived as non-patronizing, but actually as developmental and as grooming?

Yeah. And then there is one question coming from Ellen Engel talking about virtual versus live leadership influence and how does physical distance even post-COVID, my impact behaviors. And another piece that I was also thinking even earlier as I read your work and we consulted about this, because today in this pandemic we're using the concept of social distance to actually reflect, refer to physical distancing. And in your blog you were mentioning that what, 70% of people are reluctant to being socially engaged again, go to buses and trams. So how do you see all this kind of reflected on the global leaders and this concept of difference?

I mean, and I agree, I think we will still have physical distance for a long time because just because we're even vaccinated does not mean that we're all jumping into a concert of 60,000 people or I'm going to a convention meeting of 10,000 people. I don't know, we'll see. So that means we will have to live with physical distance, and so the question is how do you replicate reducing social distance in a virtual context. And I think that's a very, very interesting challenge. What we've seen, I mean, when the lockdown last year started and I was talking to executives, they all said, well, we have more efficient meetings now. And then you say, well, just because someone, the others don't speak doesn't mean you have more efficient meetings. So are you actually more distant and everyone shuts up? Or how are you able to reduce social distance so people would speak up? You actually show that you're meaning— you're generally interested in your team's judgment and you're deferring to them. And so I think being able to do this, it probably includes other behaviors, additional behaviors, than the ones that we've looked at. Some of those leaders that we looked at, they were also in global virtual teams, right? So when a leader was responsible for a whole region, a lot of their interactions already were virtual, but it was not full remote. And I would agree that in full remote work, there's probably additional behaviors we would need to— leaders would need to learn to use to bridge and reduce social distance. But I think the idea of reducing social distance is very important. I think very much timely for— we came up, this was all pre-COVID, so this is coincidental, and this idea of social distance came up before we Yeah, we talked about social distancing, but I think it is very, very relevant for the current context as well. Yeah, true.

Okay, and I have one more question. We have one minute left. Hopefully this is going to be a quick one. Somebody asked about, did you maybe look into kind of adopting some type of questionnaire, or I would actually ask you, are you kind of developing a questionnaire where we can apply it to global leaders so that we can see which type they are and if they're using or not?

Very good question. So this is— so at the moment we have not, we don't have that, no, but this would be another step. Again, one thing that we were interested, because this came really came up also in the review process, was how do recipients perceive it. So we have that follow-up to really see how is this perceived and then what are different differences. So you can— I think that this would be relevant for measuring it as well. But I agree, I mean, we have the behavioral categories, we would actually have to develop items to capture those, but I think that that could be done based on the codes and the data we have. So I think that that would be another logical next step. So thanks for mentioning this.

Yeah, well, there's a lot of work ahead of you. I haven't gone through so many of the questions here in Q&A, I'm really sorry, I apologize to everyone, we are out of time. I'm going to have to get those questions answered somehow otherwise. But thanks, thank you, Sebastian Reiche, for having this talk with us and sharing your ideas. I'm sure you have a lot of things that you have to research still. Some topics were tackled here, some are still open. For now, I'm just very, very grateful that we were able to chat today. We do have ongoing webinars, so there is information in chat for anybody who wants to apply for the next one. We have Zeynep Aykan coming on April 8th, and then April 29th with Anne Will Hartzing, and even May 20th with Vlad Vejman. So we're fully scheduled for the rest of this year, academic year. I'm not sure, Sebastian, if you want to tackle the rest of the questions through your blog, or we're going to do YouTube. But guys, tune in. Yeah, please share them.

Exactly. Yeah, I'll try to address as much as I can in different channels. But thanks very much for having me and for these great questions. I think that they were spot on, very, very interesting to also get me thinking more about this. So thanks very much. Yes, I think— And thanks for such a nice moderation, Maya.

Yeah, I know, of course. And I think this was very inspirational for all of us, all included, the presenter and us on the organizing level, and hopefully for the attendees. So yeah, great work. It was great stuff, great sharing ideas. Enjoy the rest of the day, all of you. Sebastian, thank you once again, and have a good day, everybody else. Bye-bye.

Thanks. Bye-bye.