De GLOBE Studie: Intercultureel Leiderschap dat Werkelijk Werkt

Most cross-cultural frameworks tell you how cultures differ.
The GLOBE Study tells you what kind of leader each culture is actually willing to follow.

That is a different and more useful question for anyone in an executive role.

I have worked with senior leaders across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia for more than twenty years. The gap between knowing that a culture is “high on power distance” and knowing what that means for how you chair a meeting, escalate a decision, or give feedback to a direct report — that gap is where most cross-cultural frameworks run out of road. GLOBE narrows it significantly.

Here is what you need to know about the framework, why it matters for leadership specifically, and how I have built it into the Cross-Cultural Leadership Compass alongside three other frameworks to give you a more complete picture than any single model can provide.

What Is the GLOBE Study?

The Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness study — GLOBE — was published in 2004 by Robert J. House and a team of 170 researchers across 62 societies. The study involved more than 17,000 managers in three industries: financial services, food processing, and telecommunications. It is, by any measure, one of the most ambitious cross-cultural research programs ever undertaken.

Two things make GLOBE distinctive:

First, it measures both what is and what should be. For every dimension, GLOBE asked respondents to describe their society’s current cultural practices (As Is) and separately to describe what those practices ideally should be. This distinction between the culture people actually live in and the culture they wish they lived in, is analytically powerful and practically important. It reveals tension and aspiration, not just current state.

Second, it directly links cultural practices to leadership effectiveness. GLOBE did not just map cultural differences and leave executives to draw their own conclusions. It asked respondents specifically which leadership behaviours they considered effective and which they considered ineffective. The result is a framework built for leadership questions, not just cultural description.

The GLOBE study identifies nine societal dimensions:

• Prestatiegerichtheid: the degree to which a society encourages and rewards innovation, high standards, and performance improvement
• Assertiviteit: the extent to which individuals are encouraged to be assertive, confrontational, and competitive in social relationships
• Toekomstgerichtheid: the extent to which individuals engage in future-oriented behaviours such as planning and delaying gratification
• Humane Orientation: the degree to which individuals are encouraged to be fair, altruistic, and caring toward others
• Institutional Collectivism: the degree to which institutional practices encourage collective action and distribution of resources
• Ingroep Collectivisme: the degree to which individuals express pride, loyalty, and cohesion in their organisations or families
• Vermijden van onzekerheid: the extent to which a society relies on social norms and procedures to alleviate the unpredictability of future events
• Machtsafstand: the degree to which members of a collective expect and agree that power should be unequally shared
• Gender Egalitarianism: the degree to which a collective minimises gender role differences and promotes gender equality

Why GLOBE Matters Differently from Hofstede

If you have used Hofstede’s framework, and most practitioners in this field have, you will notice overlapping territory. Power distance. Uncertainty avoidance. Collectivism. These concepts appear in both models.

So why does GLOBE add something?

Because Hofstede’s data was collected between 1967 and 1973, from IBM employees. It is foundational research and I use it because its country coverage is unmatched and its dimensions are well-validated. But IBM employees in the 1970s were not a cross-sector, cross-function population, and five decades of social change mean that some of the scores, particularly around gender and individualism, are not precisely what they would be if the research were run today.

GLOBE was conducted in the 1990s, across multiple industries, and with explicit attention to leadership behaviour. The result is a different kind of signal.

The most important GLOBE contribution for leaders is In-Group Collectivism. This dimension does not appear in Hofstede under that name. It captures something specific: the degree to which loyalty to one’s immediate group — family, organization, team — is a core social value. High In-Group Collectivism scores predict that relationship investment before professional collaboration is not a preference, it is a structural expectation. You cannot shortcut it. You cannot substitute technical competence for it. The trust that makes professional collaboration possible is built in the group, through demonstrated belonging, before the work begins.

This is the dynamic that catches Western European executives off guard in Chinese, Indian, and Middle Eastern contexts. Hofstede’s IDV (Individualism) dimension captures some of this. But GLOBE’s In-Group Collectivism is a more precise instrument for the specific leadership question: how much does the relationship have to come before the task?

Assertiveness is another dimension that Hofstede handles indirectly at best. The GLOBE Assertiveness dimension measures the cultural norm around direct, confrontational communication, and crucially, the As Is / Should Be split reveals something counterintuitive in many high-assertiveness cultures. Societies that score high on current assertiveness practices often score low on where they would zoals to be. High assertiveness is frequently an entrenched norm that the culture itself is trying to move away from. For a leader entering that context from outside, knowing the gap between practice and aspiration is genuinely useful.

Uncertainty Avoidance in GLOBE is also coded differently from Hofstede. Hofstede’s UAI measures emotional need for rules and procedures. GLOBE’s UA measures the actual practice of using norms and procedures to manage uncertainty. The distinction matters in coaching: a culture may have a strong emotional preference for certainty (Hofstede UAI high) but have developed few effective procedural mechanisms for achieving it (GLOBE UA lower). That combination produces a specific kind of organizational friction, high anxiety, low structured response, that neither framework captures alone.

What the GLOBE Data Shows in Practice

Let me make this concrete with a pairing I work with frequently: the Netherlands and China.

On Hofstede, the headline gaps are large: IDV Δ60, MAS Δ52, PDI Δ42. These are extreme differences.

GLOBE adds a layer of precision. The In-Group Collectivism gap between China (5.04) and the Netherlands (4.11) is Δ0.93 on a 7-point scale, which, in a dataset where most country differences cluster between 0.2 and 0.6, is a substantial signal. It tells us that the Chinese professional norm of building deep loyalty within the working group before trusting its outputs is not just an abstract cultural preference. It is one of the most measurable dimensions of difference in the dataset.

The Uncertainty Avoidance gap (China 5.80, Netherlands 3.70, Δ2.10) is even larger and carries a specific implication for meeting culture and decision-making. Dutch professionals are comfortable with ambiguity and often see premature process as bureaucratic overhead. Chinese professionals experience unresolved ambiguity as a risk to be managed, through documentation, escalation protocols, and explicit confirmation of scope. Neither position is wrong. Both are cultural defaults that, if unrecognized, produce friction that gets misattributed to personality, competence, or intention.

Now add the Flemish Belgian data to this picture. Belgium scores 4.69 on GLOBE UA, significantly higher than the Netherlands (3.70), and notably above Germany (4.73 is close). In a team that includes Dutch, Chinese, and Flemish members, the GLOBE UA data tells you that your Flemish team members and your Chinese colleagues share a higher tolerance for procedural structure than your Dutch colleagues. As a team leader, you can use that. You are not managing one Dutch-Chinese gap. You are managing three different UA profiles simultaneously, with GLOBE giving you the resolution to see that.

GLOBE and the Cross-Cultural Leadership Compass

This is precisely why I built GLOBE into the Cross-Cultural Leadership Compass alongside Hofstede, the World Values Survey, and Schwartz.

No single framework captures everything. Hofstede provides the broadest country coverage and the most validated six-dimension structure. GLOBE adds leadership-specific insight and the As Is / Should Be distinction. The World Values Survey captures the deepest layer of societal values — secular vs traditional, survival vs self-expression — which changes very slowly and shows up in how people relate to institutions and authority. Schwartz adds dimensions that none of the other frameworks measure: Embeddedness, Affective Autonomy, Egalitarianism — concepts that are particularly diagnostic in European and East Asian leadership contexts.

The Convergence tab in the Compass is where this matters most. When all four frameworks independently flag the same gap between two countries, you are looking at a structural difference that is not framework-dependent or artefact-prone. It is real. It has been measured from four different methodological angles and they all agree. Those convergent gaps are the highest-confidence signals for coaching, for onboarding, and for team design.

The GLOBE In-Group Collectivism gap between China and the Netherlands appears in the convergence analysis. So does the Uncertainty Avoidance gap — confirmed by both GLOBE and Hofstede, corroborated by Schwartz Embeddedness. When three frameworks independently confirm that the same dimension is a major gap between two cultures, the leadership implication is not academic. It is a practical guide to where your energy, your preparation, and your intervention should go.

Three Leadership Questions GLOBE Helps You Answer

1. What does this culture actually expect from someone in authority?

GLOBE’s CLT (Culturally Endorsed Leadership Theory) component, which was part of the original study but sits behind the dimension data, identifies which leadership archetypes are considered effective in each society. Charismatic, team-oriented, participative, humane-oriented, autonomous, and self-protective leadership styles all score differently by culture. In high Power Distance, high In-Group Collectivism cultures, self-protective and autonomous leadership styles score higher. In low Power Distance, high Performance Orientation cultures, charismatic and participative styles score higher. This is not about which style is objectively better. It is about what will read as competent and credible in the specific context you are walking into.

2. Where will my default leadership style create friction I have not anticipated?

If you have been developed as a leader in a low Power Distance, low In-Group Collectivism environment, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, the UK, your default style almost certainly includes direct feedback, flat communication, and task-based authority. GLOBE data will show you clearly which markets, teams, and stakeholder groups will experience that style as cold, disrespectful, or politically naive. The friction is predictable. Addressing it before it surfaces is far less costly than repairing a relationship that has already broken on a misread cultural signal.

3. What does my team actually need from me, and is that the same for everyone in the room?

A mixed team is not a single cultural context. It is a set of overlapping and sometimes conflicting defaults. GLOBE data gives you the dimension-level resolution to see where your Dutch direct report and your Flemish team member actually differ, even though they share a language and work in the same building. And where your Chinese colleague and your Belgian colleague actually converge, even though you might not expect them to.

Knowing that your Flemish team member has a higher GLOBE UA than your Dutch colleague is not a curiosity. It is a practical guide to how much process documentation you need to provide, how far in advance you need to share meeting agendas, and how explicitly you need to confirm the decisions your team has made before people can act on them with confidence.

Where to Start

The GLOBE data for your specific country pair — alongside Hofstede, WVS, and Schwartz — is available right now, at no cost, in the Cross-Cultural Leadership Compass.

Select any two countries, switch to the GLOBE tab, and you will see all nine dimensions side by side with gap calculations, severity indicators, and an insight card that flags the single most operationally significant GLOBE gap for that specific pairing.

The Convergence tab shows you where GLOBE and the other three frameworks agree — the high-confidence coaching signals that transcend any single model’s limitations.

If you want to go deeper, the full 11-dimension leadership report — covering meetings, trust, managing up, peer dynamics, and communication for your specific country pair and professional context — is available for purchase directly through the tool.

Use the Cross-Cultural Leadership Compass →

Jan Salomons is an executive coach and leadership developer based in the Netherlands, with 35+ years of senior management experience including a decade at ASML. He designed a four-year cross-cultural leadership programme for 400 operations managers across Europe. The Cross-Cultural Leadership Compass integrates Hofstede, GLOBE, World Values Survey, and Schwartz into a single analytical tool for leaders and coaches working across cultural boundaries.

House, R.J. et al. Culture, Leadership, and Organizations: The GLOBE Study of 62 Societies. SAGE Publications, 2004.