Leadership in global business environment through a vision creation process

Abstract

Purpose

Few works have dealt with the impact of a corporation's country of origin on the perception of the qualities and behaviour expected of its leaders. This paper seeks to focus on these aspects with special attention to the specific nature of the Japanese leadership style. The choice of Japan was conditioned neither by the author's admiration for this country, nor by his admiration for their unusual determination to attain perfection, but mainly by the position that Japanese corporations occupy in the global economy. The main objective of the work is to analyze the nature of the vision creation process.

Design/methodology/approach

The research project incorporated surveys of and interviews with 2,000 of the world's largest corporations (the Forbes Global 2000 database (2006 version)).

Findings

Japanese corporations' leaders more frequently opt for giving their subordinates a free hand in shaping their own visions than leaders of the other researched corporations. However, in nearly all the cases it was mentioned that the proposed assumptions must be coherent with the vision envisaged by top management.

Originality/value

The paper attempts to examine the phenomenon of leadership from the perspective of corporate business. The work deals with the problem of the impact of the corporation's country of origin on the perception of the expected qualities and behaviours of its leaders.

Citation

Karaszewski, R. (2010), "Leadership in global business environment through a vision creation process", The TQM Journal, Vol. 22 No. 4, pp. 399-409. https://doi.org/10.1108/17542731011053325