Global Leadership

Mark E. Mendenhall holds the J. Burton Frierson Chair of Excellence in Business Leadership at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga. A leading scholar of expatriation and global leadership development, he convened the research community whose framework text defined the field's competencies for leading across cultural, political, and economic boundaries.

As globalization intensified interconnectedness across economic, political, and cultural realms, global leadership research defined the competencies — cognitive complexity, cosmopolitanism, cultural agility — leading across boundaries requires.

The era: Distributed & Complex — Distributed, dispersed, interdependent, embedded in interaction; leadership as learning; global competencies; combine all theories.

Global competencies for interconnected, cross-cultural contexts.

This theory sits in the Distributed & Complex era of the map: Distributed, dispersed, interdependent, embedded in interaction; leadership as learning; global competencies; combine all theories.

• Mendenhall, M. E., Osland, J. S., Bird, A., Oddou, G. R., & Maznevski, M. L. (2008). Global Leadership: Research, Practice, and Development. Routledge. Google Scholar ↗
• Bird, A., & Mendenhall, M. E. (2016). From cross-cultural management to global leadership. Journal of World Business, 51(1), 115–126. Google Scholar ↗