Chapter 5: Influence and Global Leadership: China, India, and the Multinational Corporation

The chapter aims to explore the leadership transition of Chinese and Indian high potentials in multinational corporations from local leadership responsibilities to global leadership responsibilities. It focuses on influencing capabilities and the importance of verbal influencing skills in the global matrix organization.

This chapter presents a comparative analysis of three approaches of influence (verbal influence, structural influence, and relational influence) and explains how they differ culturally. The discussion is based on qualitative interviews with senior business leaders at multinational organizations.

The authors propose that verbal influence is a primary skill gap preventing the acceleration of Chinese and Indian high potentials into global leadership roles. The chapter highlights how Western multinational corporations prefer verbal influence over the more prevalent structural and relational influence styles found in China and Indian contexts. The findings link this primacy afforded to verbal influence to culture and the implicit leadership theories (ILTs) of Western multinational corporations.