Developing Trust and Gaining Commitment when Leading Across Borders

Abstract

Leading and managing across borders in international partnership alliances creates new leadership challenges for managers. Central challenges concern the development of trust and gaining commitment from partners who usually work for different, and possibly competing, international organisations. This paper investigates concepts and issues of trust and commitment at a national cultural level and stresses the importance of taking into account trust and commitment issues at the organisational cultural level. Drawing from literature, and based on an empirically validated organisational typology model, it postulates a new model, the MOSAIC Model, to support the identification of leadership and behavioural approaches to trust and commitment at the organisational cultural level.