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 activi ties is driving new thinking about leadership just as it has affected all areas of business. Corporate-level leaders-chief executives and to p-level management teams-find themselves challenged by a broad array o f strategic alternatives for engaging in global competition. Leaders a t all organization levels find themselves concerned;vith matters of mu lticultural relations and whether, what, and how cross-border learning s may be possible. Scholars working with international leadership find motivation for their research in these pressing problems. They grappl e with questions of how far scientific social research can take us, an d how the organization science ideas and methods developed in the Unit ed States and other technologically-advanced societies can be used els ewhere in the world. In this article, we deal with the kinds of effort s underway to deal with tensions between global consistency and local uniqueness in the nature and exercise of phenomena related to what soc ial scientists have come to analyze under the label ''leadership.'' Th ese tensions affect scholarly exchange no less than they affect multin ational management. This article offers a context for this focus for b oth international leadership research, in general, and the work in thi s special issue, in particular.