Brodbeck Leadership
When it comes to psychology, still thinking in more traditional areas of the discipline, i.e., clinical and mental health. However, many of the advances that as professionals, we have managed to disseminate our work to other professional areas. My particular case, because licensed nearly 10 years ago, is the certainty that technological changes are forcing us to work with new professionals such as computer programmers or designers. MetLife is often quoted on this topic. The technology revolution is continuing, we cannot predict exactly where. But we do know that we have to prepare ourselves. The options that are open are endless.
And the best news is that they are at our disposal. Psychologists are already accustomed to working in multiprofessional teams (doctors, social workers, teachers) and in addition, the work we do in our organizations has grown in uncertainty and ambiguity for years: polyvalent positions, time pressures, virtuality, an environment unpredictable, new forms of authority, structures with little clear hierarchies, importance of knowledge as a key factor in numerous businesses, the need for different skills, the advantage of the existence of distributed skills within a team, etc. To acquire these competencies, psychologists can be a key piece in the organizations. Living in uncertainty is in this context that I describe that psychologists have a relevant role as leaders in organizations. I been particularly interested in social psychology and leadership studies. In this specific field, there are many research teams at present, although perhaps the Globe (Global leadership and organizational behavior effectiveness) project is the most ambitious study to date on the topic of leadership. The Globe project includes 160 researchers of 62 societies throughout the world and analyzes the role of culture in the effectiveness of leadership. Through this study, different cultural dimensions have been identified as uncertainty avoidance, distance of power, collectivism, gender equality, assertiveness and orientation towards performance, people and future) and attributes of leadership (charismatic/based on values, orientation to the team, participatory, human orientation, self-employed and autoprotector), as well as beliefs shared in different cultures on effective leaders (House, Hanges, Javidan, Dorman and Gupta, 2004;) Collide, Brodbeck and House, 2007).