Professor Robert J. House received his Ph.D. degree in Management from the Ohio State University. He went on to hold faculty appointments at Ohio State University, University of Michigan, City University of New York and the University of Toronto. In 1988 he was appointed the Joseph Frank Bernstein Professor Endowed Chair of Organization Studies at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. A prolific writer, he authored more than 130 journal articles, several of which have been reprinted in numerous anthologies. Among the multiple awards conferred, House received the award for Distinguished Scholarly Contribution to Management, the Eminent Leadership Scholar award, and the ILA Lifetime Achievement award, as well as many awards for outstanding publications. He also authored two papers, which are Scientific Citations Classics. House was the Principle Investigator and Founder of the Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness Research Program (GLOBE). Further, he founded a non-profit foundation to sustain the GLOBE Project beyond his tenure including a board of directors and a constitution. House was a Fellow of the Academy of Management, American Psychological Association, and Society for Industrial/Organizational Psychology. House’s major research interests were varied but focused on relationships among power, personality, and leadership in contributing to organizational performance. The last two decades of his life focused on the implications of cross-cultural variation for effective leadership. Prof. House passed away on November 1, 2011.
Leadership, Culture and Organizations reports the results of a ten-year research program, the Global Leadership and Organizational Behaviour Effectiveness research program (GLOBE). GLOBE is a long-term program designed to conceptualize, operationalize, test and validate a cross-level integrated theory of the relationship between culture and societal, organizational, and leadership effectiveness. A team of 160 scholars worked together since 1994 to study societal culture, organizational culture, and attributes of effective leadership in 62 cultures. Leadership, Culture, and Organizations reports the findings of the first two phases of GLOBE. The book is primarily based on the results of the survey of over 17,000 middle managers in three industries: banking, food processing, and telecommunications, as well as archival measures of country economic prosperity and the physical and psychological well-being of the cultures studied. GLOBE has several distinguishing features. First, it is truly a cross-cultural research program. The constructs were defined, conceptualized, and operationalized by the multicultural team of researchers. Second, the industries were selected through a polling of the country investigators, and the instruments were designed with the full participation of the researchers representing the different cultures. Finally, the data in each country were collected by investigators who were either natives of the cultures studied or had extensive knowledge and experience in that culture. A unique feature of this book is that while it is an edited book and many experts have written the different chapters, unlike other edited books, it is a fully integrated, seamless, and cohesive book covering the many aspects of the theory underpinning the GLOBE.
