Lena Zander

Uppsala University | UU · Department of Business Studies

In this paper, we address how different types of positive attitude towards international diversity among team members can influence team outcomes. Our study explores whether openness to language diversity could contribute to the effect of openness to value diversity becoming more salient. Data was collected from 1085 team leaders of highly globalis...

Culture has a profound impact on interpersonal leadership, which refers to an everyday type of leadership involving leader interaction with subordinates. Typical interpersonal leadership actions include empowering, providing support and development, directing, following-up and giving feedback, as well as communicating and encouraging collaboration...

The centrality of communication in international business (IB) is undeniable; yet our understanding of the phenomenon is partially constrained by a cross-cultural comparative focus as opposed to intercultural, process-oriented research designs that capture the dynamic nature of communicative interactions. Our brief review of studies at the intersec...

A central focus of cross-cultural management research is how individuals and organizations differ across national cultures and how that fundamentally shapes their thoughts and actions and serves as a unit of identification. In this article, we critically reconsider the essential categorical nature of culture, problematizing categorization and quest...

In this special issue we aim to advance the theoretical, conceptual and empirical knowledge about the relationship between global teams and human resource management in international organizations. We argue that although the prevalence of global teams in international organizations is rapidly rising, simultaneously affecting the management of firms...

To explore group-based identities and collective sensemaking in the context of a cross-border alliance, a qualitative exploratory study was initiated. The emphasis was on interpretation of issues, within and around an interfirm partnership and the alliance process, perceived by those involved as important. The BP and Statoil strategic alliance, for...

Kate Daellenbach Lena Zander Peter Thirkell , (2016),"A sensemaking perspective on arts sponsorship decisions", Arts and the Market, Vol. 6 Iss 1 pp. 68 - 87 Permanent link to this document: http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/AAM-05-2013-0006 Abstract Purpose: The purpose of this study is to better understand the sensemaking strategies of managers involved...

In this focused issue on the theme of “Leveraging Values in Global Organizations”, we highlight several prevalent themes on national, organizational and individual values in the literature. We argue that many premises in the literature have been accepted as fact; yet there are still many avenues open to exploration. We present several paradoxes tha...

PurposeWe propose team-based organizing as an alternative to more traditional forms of hierarchy-based organizing in global firms. Methodology/approachAdvancements in the study of global teams, leadership, process, and outcomes were organized into four themes: (1) openness toward linguistic and value diversity as enhancing team creativity and perfo...

Global organizations have been slow to adapt to technological advancements and globalization over the last several decades. This symposium challenges traditional perspectives about global firms, global organizing and teamwork, by suggesting that our extant views about operating effectively in the modern era are in need of an update. We suggest a so...

From the early 2000’s and in response to the increased international activities of emerging markets, academic interest in internationalization of firms from these economies has grown. This research has focused on how the culture and the management practices from these economies challenge existing theories on internationalisation and management of...

Globalization is creating challenges which need to be addressed through new thinking. This panel symposium places these challenges at its heart and queries how firms, people and business schools can make a difference, with global leadership and as global leaders. For this panel symposium we have brought together an international group of scholars t...

This study investigates the relationship between cultural values and shared leadership preferences, using a sample of 357 potential globally dispersed team members. A significant positive relationship between both horizontal individualism and horizontal collectivism and shared leadership preferences is identified. We also find significant differenc...

Multinational companies (MNCs) may not need to (or even desire) a coherent set of similar management practices throughout the organization (global integration); instead, they may opt for combinations of local adaptation and regional integration. We query what the implication are when key individuals (founders, managers and expatriates) act as natio...

Scientists and academics increasingly work on collaborative projects and write papers in international research teams. This trend is driven by greater publishing demands in terms of the quality and breadth of data and analysis methods, which tend to be difficult to achieve without collaborating across institutional and national boundaries. Yet, our...

In this paper, we query what the implications would be for multinational companies (MNCs) if management practices did neither reflect regionalism nor globalization, but national cultures. Key individuals (founders, expatriates, and the upper echelons of management) enabled by primary socialization, act as national culture carriers when selecting, c...

This is a longitudinal qualitative study of a "core value identification" project, which was launched as a critical component of a multinational company's (MNC's) global integration strategy. With an abductive research design in which theoretical framework, empirical fieldwork, and case analysis evolve simultaneously, we explore core value identifi...

Support from the corporate sector is an important revenue source for many nonprofit organizations. In this article, we consider individual-level influence within the decision-making processes of companies as they make decisions concerning nonprofit arts sponsorship. These decisions have often been linked to the influence of a single high-level exec...

Using stereotypes as a concept is highly value-laden. Mention of stereotype use in the global leadership discussion is notably absent; aside from the extent they are overcome by competent leaders. In this paper, we draw on multiple streams of literature to conceptually argue why stereotypes and the use of categories by global leaders can be support...

Global teams that are characterized by national, cultural and linguistic heterogeneity and operate in a globally dispersed virtual environment are becoming an established form of organizing work in multinational organizations. As global team leadership research is rather limited, we review the literature on leading multicultural and virtual teams i...

As Holt and Seki (2012) assert, it is impor-tant to develop multicultural competen-cies, to be at once focused, driven, and people oriented. These are qualities that help a leader to overcome the challenges associated with the paradoxes that are inevitably encountered once work crosses national and cultural boundaries. But how do these qualities he...

With multinational corporations increasingly adopting English as a corporate language, the issue of language management and the pros and cons of language standardization have been widely debated in the literature. Our 17-country study considers whether the use of English as a common corporate language causes difficulties. We empirically examine whe...

With multinational corporations increasingly adopting English as a corporate language, the issue of language management and the pros and cons of language standardization have been widely debated in the literature. Our 17-country study considers whether the use of English as a common corporate language causes difficulties. We empirically examine whe...

Summary Current research on multicultural teams tends to exhibit a bias towards studying the negative effects of team diversity more than the positive. This negative bias has limited our understanding of the conditions that promote the benefits of diversity and of the mechanisms that foster these benefits. In this article, we highlight a complement...

Summary Using the intersectionality perspective as a theoretical lens in the study of the multinational company (MNC) - with its spatial separation of subunits, language and cultural diversity, organizational complexity, and multiplicity of activity environments - will yield exciting and novel possibilities for theory creation. A prime area of stud...

International acquisitions are today the most important foreign direct investment vehicle, and the ensuing integration processes are notoriously fraught with problems. We situate, discuss, and develop the main results of an early study in the knowledge-based view tradition – the award-winning Bresman, Birkinshaw, and Nobel (1999) article. To enhanc...

What we know is that the concept of cultural distance is frequently used, hotly debated and for many intuitively appealing. Suffering from a series of illusionary properties, it is argued to have outlived its usefulness. What we need to know is how to conceptualize the complexity of culture as a multi-dimensional, multi-level concept, taking contex...

Summary Organizing work in multicultural teams has gone from rhetoric to reality, leaving international organizations with challenging tasks and little strategic guidance. A wealth of multicultural team research reaches the conclusion that management matters, but less is known about team leadership. Drawing on recent leadership research, we focus o...

We propose solutions to two recurring problems in cross-national research: response style differences and language bias. In order to do so, we conduct a methodological comparison of two different response formats—rating and ranking. For rating, we assess the effect of changing the commonly used 5-point Likert scales to 7-point Likert scales. For ra...

Team working is a key skill students need in this era of global complexity. Here we combine research with practice to develop a model for working in multicultural teams which can be used in International Business curricula. We formulate the 4 Cs model focusing on two areas: composition and communication. These two Cs have been chosen because they a...

Cross-national research is plagued by many obstacles. This article focuses on one of these obstacles: the fact that research in more than one country usually involves respondents with different native languages. We investigated whether the language of the questionnaire influences response patterns. More specifically we tested whether responding in...

This area of leadership-related communication is underresearched from the employees' perspective. In earlier research, leadership similarities across groups of countries generated a country cluster taxonomy argued to be based on country commonalities such as language similarities. The assumption is that employees in countries with similar languages...

The objective of the study presented in this article is to answer the question of when nationality matters regarding employees’ interpersonal leadership preferences. Based on a literature review, 16 tenure- and demographic-based groupings of employees (four departments, five work positions, five age groups and gender) were identified. Hypotheses we...