International perspectives on international leadership

The ever-increasing awareness by businesses in every part of the world that distant organizations and distant events affect their own activities is driving new thinking about leadership just as it has affected all areas of business. Corporate-level leaders-chief executives and top-level management teams-find themselves challenged by a broad array of strategic alternatives for engaging in global competition. Leaders at all organization levels find themselves concerned;vith matters of multicultural relations and whether, what, and how cross-border learnings may be possible. Scholars working with international leadership find motivation for their research in these pressing problems. They grapple with questions of how far scientific social research can take us, and how the organization science ideas and methods developed in the United States and other technologically-advanced societies can be used elsewhere in the world. In this article, we deal with the kinds of efforts underway to deal with tensions between global consistency and local uniqueness in the nature and exercise of phenomena related to what social scientists have come to analyze under the label ''leadership.'' These tensions affect scholarly exchange no less than they affect multinational management. This article offers a context for this focus for both international leadership research, in general, and the work in this special issue, in particular.