Global Mindset – A Requirement for Global Corporate Leaders

Abstract

Globalisation has created several changes to the corporate environment.  The corporate decision whether or not to compete with global competitors has become limited and is in fact nearly impossible to avoid.  Global corporate have to build strategies and staffing policies that are in alignment with the corporate goals.  Due to the changing corporate environment, global mindset has become a phenomenon frequently regarded as a prerequisite for global corporate success in a globalised corporate world.

The literature on the global mindset is extensive, where the phenomenon is used to describe way of conceiving the world and behaving respectively.  Derived from different types of literature, global mindset with a strong foot within cognitive psychology and global leadership from corporate leadership, strategic and intercultural management literature, makes the phenomenon theoretically different. 

This research article has a social constructive approach towards understanding how knowledge is created and how reality is perceived.  Through using secondary data, an extensive understanding of how global mindset has been defined, what constructs it is made up of is reviewed.  The discussion will build an understanding of the need for a global mindset and what the determinants for global mindset development is, for global leaders, corporate and employees.

Global mindset is used as an integrated phenomenon, with a cognitive, psychological, behavioural and interactional dimension, which provides a complete picture of the required global leadership competencies.  The development of global mindset is a corporate and personal responsibility, where socialization is the crucial point for development of global mindset.  The idea that s specific global mindset exists is rejected based on the notion that the requirements for global leaders will vary depending on the position in the corporate and that global leadership is a contextual term, making it impossible to characterize a specific mindset for global leaders.