The Impact of Cultural Factors on Leadership in a Global Church

Leaders around the world are finding out that globalization has complicated their lives. The rules found in old administrative manuals no longer work smoothly in a world of cultural diversity. What used to be “straight-forward” is now more difficult because your colleagues in the multicultural team bring their own perceptions and expectations to the table. Things that could be easily fixed “with a little good will” or “behind closed doors” have now become complex, culture-charged, and counterintuitive. Information, once the carefully guarded power of the few in the hierarchy, is now readily available on the web and distributed widely in organizations and beyond. What is even more unsettling to some is that new winds of transparency create an environment where bosses used to solve problems by stalling, now find themselves reduced to irrelevance as workers on different sides of an issue can now “tweet” their perspectives, discuss their views on Facebook, posting supporting evidence for everyone to see. Today people who were once disconnected and geographically separated can now work together across continents in real time, seeing each other on their Skype monitors and hearing each other’s voices, and working on projects together that formerly would not have been possible without days of travel. While these developments are vividly described by authors like Thomas Friedman in The World Is Flat (2005) or Clay Shirkey in Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (2008), there is a fact that cannot be overlooked: we may not be that well prepared to work together with those to whom we are connected. There is a lot more than geographical distance that separates us from one another. More and more evidence points to the fact that the culture-inspired invisible assumptions, values, and norms that leaders bring with them create a distance between leaders working next door to each other that may be harder to bridge than the distance to a team member across continents (Branson and Martinez 2011).