Cross-Cultural Leadership Study

• In Event: Comparative Research in Public Relations: Exploring Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

This presentation will focus on the methodological, epistemological, and practical challenges associated with the Global Study of Leadership in Public Relations and Communication Management (Berger & Meng, 2014) (henceforth known as the “Global Leadership Study”). The Global Leadership Study surveyed more than 4,000 practitioners across 23 countries and nine languages in the largest ever investigation of leadership in the field of public relations.
Conducting global opinion research is challenging, particularly when coordinating a multi-country data collection from one centralized location. Given the lack of a definitive sampling list of public relations practitioners around the globe, early project concerns focused on the issue of appropriate sampling. Relying on work by House and colleagues (2004), countries and regions were carefully selected for inclusion in the project in an effort to best maximize variation in geography and a number of sociocultural characteristics. Organizers of the Global Leadership Study then relied on assistance from the Plank Center for Leadership in Public Relations as a means of reaching senior-level scholars and leaders of professional organizations in these targeted geographic areas.
Much of the project’s success can be credited to the careful management of teams by the project organizers. Managing teams of researchers and collaborators across the globe can be a difficult task, but was accomplished in this study by empowering the global partners by granting them decision-making powers for the duration of the project. The freedom granted to collaborative partners was carefully balanced by meticulous attention to detail, particularly surrounding issues of reliability and validity when producing the translated survey instruments. A focal point of this presentation will be on the efforts taken to find this balance.
The translation process was conducted using back translation procedures (Brislin, 1970) requiring multiple instrument translations. This process allowed for the creation of a number of survey instruments that simultaneously preserved the overriding themes of the original English-language data collection, while at the same time capturing the unique cultural context for each of the regions targeted for participation.
The presentation will conclude with a discussion of the practical challenges of coordinating a global data collection in a timely manner.

Authors

• Michael Cacciatore, U of Georgia

• Chun-ju Flora Hung-Baesecke, Massey U