Cross-Cultural Leadership

Students will be housed at Maastricht University, one of the top 100 universities worldwide. Maastricht is located in The Netherlands, the heart of western Europe, providing convenient access to each of the countries to be visited. The university will assist with trip planning, as well as providing guest lectures to augment CNU’s faculty.

Program Locations

Multi-Country Program: Based in Maastricht, Netherlands, with travel to additional cities of Amsterdam, Delft, Zaanse Schans and Margraten along with Brussels, Belgium; Strasbourg, France; Lucerne, Switzerland; and Luxembourg City, Luxembourg.

Course Description

Old maps of a “flat” world show the area of origin as the center or middle of the Earth, illustrating the mindset of societal and cultural preeminence. Though it is clear that our cartography has become more accurate, do we still approach leadership with this mindset of cultural preeminence? How, by contrast, does one lead effectively across cultures in the globalized and globalizing world of the 21st century? The purpose of this course is to explore, experience, and understand the influences of globalization and societal culture on leadership and help students to develop leadership knowledge, skills, and an effective mindset for leading across the cultures. We will also harness a wonderful opportunity to ask the following questions: In which ways does globalization facilitate the global coronavirus pandemic through which we are currently living? How does each society we visit responds to the pandemic? In which ways does each country's responses reflect the cultural values of the society? What has been the impact of the pandemic on the individual countries of Europe, on the wider organization of Europe, on European Union? What are the implications to leadership?

Defining leadership as the process of leaders and followers acting together within a given context to achieve a common goal, the course explores how globalization, culture, and social values shape leadership behaviors on the individual, national, and global levels. This study abroad course operates with a particular focus on the nations of Western Europe (Latin European and Germanic European Cultural Clusters), including France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Switzerland. These diverse nations have experienced and responded to the imperatives from globalization, in particular, the coronavirus pandemic in different ways. Through personal observation and investigation of concepts, patterns, and issues that shape society and cultural values, students will learn the importance of society and culture to effective leadership in a global context and understand how to assess social structure and culture when making leadership decisions. Seeking to clarify the ways that world cultures are becoming both more different and more similar in the present day, this course focuses, in sum, on the impact of cultural differences to leadership.