Few studies have contributed more to the field of global leadership than the GLOBE Project. The data has had an enormous impact on our field, and I draw regularly from the findings. I’ve been anticipating the release of the 2026 study, a massive undertaking that provides a desperately needed update to this work.
The research team behind GLOBE 2026 has given us an enormous gift. Not only have they tackled this study with extraordinary rigor and precision, they proactively worked to move beyond a WEIRD data set, by significantly expanding the research in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. The result is data from 44,971 managers and professionals across 134 societies, representing more than 95 percent of the world’s population and 99 percent of global GDP.
I expect to reflect on these findings for several months, including drawing on them as part of the ambitious research we’re conducting at Boston University to better understand global leadership effectiveness. But here are a few highlights worth noting:
1. There’s far more global agreement about “good” leadership than before
I repeatedly tout the statistic from my own research: 90% of leadership material is biased toward a Western context. The findings from GLOBE 2026 suggest I may need to temper that critique. One of the most surprising discoveries is that across 134 societies, people overwhelmingly want similar things from leaders. Everyone wants leaders who are visionary, principled, task-oriented, participative, supportive, and team-oriented. And across pretty much every culture, we all overwhelmingly reject the idea of self-serving and solitary leaders. (I know! Ironic given what we are experiencing in real life!).
I have some ideas about why we’re seeing more convergence around what “good leadership” looks like. In part, Western perspectives of leadership have colonized leadership models everywhere. I’m sometimes surprised to hear leaders from places like Zambia, China, or Uruguay argue for things like radical candor, efficiency, and win/win negotiation tactics. When you dig deeper, you see that many of the voices publishing leadership in the global south were educated in the West. There may in fact be a more “global” view of leadership emerging but we’re wise to apply this finding cautiously.
2. The same leadership behavior means different things in different places
Yes, the findings from GLOBE 2026 suggest we want similar things from our leaders. But perhaps not as much has changed as the data might initially suggest. We want the same things from our leaders but the behaviors that demonstrate those values vary as much as ever. For me, “visionary leadership” includes hearing groundbreaking possibilities that can have enormous impact. For others, “visionary leadership” might mean a detailed analysis of what lies ahead. More specifically, the GLOBE findings show that professionals sampled in the US, China, and Sweden scored almost identical on the importance of visionary leadership. Yet for US professionals, visionary leadership meant emphasizing individual interests and organizational benefits. Chinese respondents expected vision to be connected to national strategic priorities; and in Sweden, leaders are expected to build employee buy-in as part of developing vision.
The variation in what leadership behaviors communicate is a really important finding, particularly in an age when many are enamored by the idea of leadership authenticity. Leaders can change their behavior and still be true to themselves. Different behaviors express the same values to different people. We need the ability to shift the leadership archetype we use based on the task, culture, and situation. Perhaps my “90 percent statistic” still applies!
3. Nationality matters, but it’s a relatively weak predictor of leadership expectations
The GLOBE 2026 findings provide robust data to support what many of us have been sensing. The significance of nationality in what people value and how they want leaders to behave is weakening. Where you’re from still plays a role in your leadership expectations but there’s growing variation among what individuals from the same country want.
According to the GLOBE findings, nationality only accounts for 9-18 percent of the differences in what individuals expect from an outstanding leader. We need to beware of speaking dogmatically about how to lead Saudis versus Emiratis because the industry, work style, and neurodivergence of an individual might be far more relevant to how they want to be led than the country on their birth certificate. Even less reliable are cultural norms based on geographical regions (yes—I wrote a book that does this very thing!). For example, the GLOBE study finds that Swedish professionals, often lumped together with all Nordics, significantly differ from their Scandinavian neighbors in how strongly they value task-oriented leadership. Mongolia, however, departs from their Asian neighbors by putting much less priority on task-oriented leadership. Based on this alone, we could argue that Mongolia is more like Denmark than China when it comes to a desire for task-oriented leadership. But of course, it’s far more nuanced than that.
As I interview global executives, they repeatedly identify generational diversity, functional differences, and organizational culture as more relevant to their challenges than national differences. Nationality will continue to be an important variable to consider for how to lead globally, but cultural intelligence and global leadership development must more robustly expand to include myriad other contextual variables.
Where we need to go further
I’m extremely grateful for the enormous contribution of GLOBE 2026. Yet I’m left with a nagging concern. The study, like most global leadership research, puts the primary emphasis on the people side of leading globally and gives limited attention to the strategic business realities facing global leaders. As I talk with global executives, they stay awake at night weighing geopolitical conflicts, economic fragmentation, AI, and how all this intersects with their globally dispersed, multicultural teams. They don’t deny the relevance of culture. But they’re looking for evidence-based direction about how culture intersects with the geopolitical complexities and risks shaping business.
The north star driving my thinking is: What does it take to lead effectively in a global context where the forces inside us, between us, and around us are all colliding?
Culture and cultural intelligence will always be part of the answer. But we’re in a moment that demands more.
We need to research and talk about the inner life of a global leader. How do our ego, internal chatter, and cognitive overload shape the ways we lead?
We need to figure out how culture intersects with the external disruptions relentlessly commanding a leader’s attention.
We need to account for how a global leader manages the pervasive power of organizational culture alongside the kinds of cultural differences that have traditionally dominated our field.
GLOBE 2026 gives us a richer, more globally representative foundation for understanding what people expect from leaders and how those expectations vary. The next frontier is broadening the research and application of cultural intelligence and global leadership to include the strategic realities of doing business in a complex global environment. I’m enormously grateful to the GLOBE research team for giving all of us such an extraordinary new resource for that work and look forward to building on it to build a more culturally intelligent world for all.