Shanghai, April 6 2006, Dr. Peter W. Dorfman, Professor of Management at New Mexico State University delivered a speech titled "Universal and Culturally Contingent Leadership Styles: Leading Locally and Globally" at the CEIBS Executive Forum.

Professor Dorfman got his Masters and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Maryland and his current research involves investigating the impact of cultural influences on managerial behavior and leadership styles. He has been a co-principal investigator of the decade-long Global Leadership and Organizational Behavioral Effectiveness (GLOBE) Research Project.

In this presentation, Professor Dorfman used the 21 primary leadership dimensions found previously in the GLOBE leadership project to discuss how one might go about leading globally and locally. Professor Dorfman and his colleagues tested hypotheses regarding which primary leadership dimensions were rated as universally positive across cultures, which were universally negative, and which were culturally contingent. For the culturally contingent leadership dimensions, they determined which aspects of national culture accounted for the desirability or undesirability of each leadership dimension. A conceptual model is proposed to help understand the cultural and psychological processes that most likely explain the adoption of universally positive, universally negative, and culturally contingent leadership.