Leadership and Team Processes Across Cultures

Leadership is important, and is getting more important. The increase incompensation for leaders may be an illustration for the more important influence they have on the performance of the company. Where American companies paid the CEO in 1980 30 to 40 times the average worker paycheck,in 2007, CEO s in the United States took home an average $ 10.5 million, approx. 340 times the salary of a typical American worker (Anderson, Cavanagh, Collins & Pizzigati, 2008). We may assume that the growing gap is justified by increased importance of the (top) management. Topic of this thesis is the different way of managing a team, and the impact on team processess. In five empirical studies we are looking for leadership behaviour, following the classical Blake and Mouton model: concern for people (in these studies called supportive leadership or consideration ) and concern for production (called directive leadership or initiating structure ). These two styles have impact on team processes, and the question is if the impact is the same across the globe . Are the, mostly in America, developed theories valid in other cultures? To test the relationships between leadership and team processesacross cultures for these studies we used a database from Hay Group, a worldwide operating consultancy company. The database contain data from approx. 70,000 managers, observer by their (on avarage 4) employees, outof 76 countries. This database is enriched with culture data from Hofstede (1980, 2001) and the GLOBE project (House et al. 2004). We used multi level techniques to be able to test the relationships, without violating the hierarchical structure: employees are employed in teams, teams function within companies and companies are located in countries.The results told us that the supportive leadership style is universal: more supportive leadership will create better team processes. This is not the case for the directive leadership style: this style harms the team processes mainly in the individualistic countries. Also the use of the two styles is related to culture: the directive style is used more in collectivistic cultures and in cultures where power distance is bigger. We also investigated human being s most obvious dichotomies: gender differences (at individual level) and team composition (on team level of cause). Research on our database found that female managers use more supportive leadership (as predicted) but also more directive leadership. Team composition has impact on male managers: when teams are less dominated by male managers, these male managers used less directive leadership and more supportive leadership.Culture also has impact on the way managers assess themselves: this (self-) assessment is more accurate in less power difference cultures. Managers with a more accurate self-assessment are able to generate more team cohesion, but we find this relationship especially in countries where power difference is low.Dankwoord / Acknowledgements Summary Samenvatting Chapter 1. Introduction 1.1 Introduction 1.2 Goal of this dissertation 1.3 Key variables in this project 1.4 Database and samples 1.5 Overview of the chapters Chapter 2. Leadership and Team Cohesiveness across Cultures Chapter 3. Leadership styles and group organizational citizenship behavior across cultures Chapter 4. Self-other agreement on leadership perceptions increases team cohesion: the moderating role of societal power distance Chapter 5. Leadership behaviors around the world: The relative importance of gender versus cultural background Chapter 6. Gender ratio, societal culture, and male and female leadership Chapter 7. General discussion 7.1 Cross cultural leadership: some differences are more important than others 7.2 Methodological issues 7.3 Practical implications Literaturenrpages: 177status: publishe

Searching for VHE gamma-ray emission associated with IceCube neutrino alerts using FACT, H.E.S.S., MAGIC, and VERITAS

The realtime follow-up of neutrino events is a promising approach to search for astrophysical neutrino sources. It has so far provided compelling evidence for a neutrino point source: the flaring gamma-ray blazar TXS 0506+056 observed in coincidence with the high-energy neutrino IceCube-170922A detected by IceCube. The detection of very-high-energy gamma rays (VHE, E>100GeV E > 100 G e V ) from this source helped establish the coincidence and constrained the modeling of the blazar emission at the time of the IceCube event. The four major imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescope arrays (IACTs) - FACT, H.E.S.S., MAGIC, and VERITAS - operate an active follow-up program of target-of-opportunity observations of neutrino alerts sent by IceCube. This program has two main components. One are the observations of known gamma-ray sources around which a cluster of candidate neutrino events has been identified by IceCube (Gamma-ray Follow-Up, GFU). Second one is the follow-up of single high-energy neutrino candidate events of potential astrophysical origin such as IceCube-170922A. GFU has been recently upgraded by IceCube in collaboration with the IACT groups. We present here recent results from the IACT follow-up programs of IceCube neutrino alerts and a description of the upgraded IceCube GFU system