The race to EU integration: How many and how high are the hurdles?

Since the accession of the new member countries to the EU, the issues of regional growth and competitiveness have received wide attention by academics, governments and practitioners, and the benefits and drawbacks of EU membership are more and more the topics of public debate in the CEE region. It is not surprising that these questions sparked lively discussion at the conference “Catalysts and Impediments of Economic Development in Central and Eastern Europe,” hosted by Vilnius University in October, 2004. This introductory note to the special issue overviews a selection of papers presented at the conference. The papers fall under any of six main themes: fiscal and monetary policy, competitiveness of the CEE region, social policy and public sector economics, economic theory, prospects for business and marketing

Leading Global Teams

Global teams that are characterized by national, cultural and linguistic heterogeneity and operate in a globally dispersed virtual environment are becoming an established form of organizing work in multinational organizations. As global team leadership research is rather limited, we review the literature on leading multicultural and virtual teams in a global context, focusing on leadership competencies, styles, strategies and modes. We also examine the emergent concepts of biculturalism, global mindset and cultural intelligence with respect to team leaders. Our aim is to add to our knowledge of leading global teams, highlight recent trends and suggest directions for future research. Three themes for global team leadership emerged: leaders as boundary spanners, bridge makers and blenders; people-oriented leadership; and leveraging diversity. We discuss implications for research and practice

An Opportunity for East and West to Share Leadership: A Multicultural Analysis of Shared Leadership Preferences in Global Teams.

This study investigates the relationship between cultural values and shared leadership preferences, using a sample of 357 potential globally dispersed team members. A signi fi cant positive relationship between both horizontal individualism and horizontal collectivism and shared leadership preferences is identi fi ed. We also fi nd signi fi cant dif- ferences in individual-level cultural values between Asian and non-Asian respondents. Shared leadership preferences exhibited fewer differences, suggesting the possibility for sharing leadership in multicultural teams. Our fi ndings add to the literature by detailing the relationship between cultural values and shared leadership preferences, and furthering our understanding of contemporary team leadership preferences among Asians and non- Asians

The internationalization efforts of lithuanian manufacturing firms - Strategy or luck?

With the enlargement of the European Union, many Central and Eastern European (CEE) manufacturing companies have greater opportunity for internationalizing their activities. Although it is generally held that small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) have the flexibility and ability to adapt to their environment more quickly than large enterprises, SMEs must be able to use these advantages in internationalizing. This study considers the internationalization efforts of a sample of Lithuanian manufacturing SMEs. Specifically, it is sought to reveal whether any patterns in the foreign market entry decisions of these firms may be found, through an examination of the degree of internationalization and its dependence on company age, size, risk aversion, commitment toward internationalization and knowledge acquisition. It is revealed that as yet, Lithuanian SMEs are in a state of uncertainty, and rely on manufacturing contracts in their home market. A pattern of “no pattern” may best describe their process of internationalization

Special issue of International Journal of Human Resource Management: The benefits of global teams for international organizations: HR implications

The abstract is included in the articl

The new millennial global leaders : what a difference a generation makes!

Our observations of successful global leaders in much of the literature to date are drawn from individuals who began their careers before the effects of globalization began to be felt signifi-cantly. However, times are changing, along with an understanding about leading and being led by a new generation of workers. In this chapter, we analyse and reflect on our current knowl-edge of the generation born in the global era that is now emerging into positions of leadership. In the popular media, this cohort, born between 1982 and 2004 (Strauss & Howe, 1991),1is known as Generation Y (Sheahan, 2005), Generation Next (Zemke, Raines, & Filipczak, 2000), Generation Net (Tapscott, 2009), Generation Me (Twenge, 2006), Trophy Kids (Alsop, 2008), Generation Whine (Bennet, 2012), and the Millennial Generation (Hershatter & Epstein, 2010; Howe & Strauss, 2000). In this chapter we will use the label ‘Millennial generation’ and refer to individuals as ‘Millennials

A Twenty-First Century Assessment of Values Across the Global

This article provides current Schwartz Values Survey (SVS) data from samples of business managers and professionals across 50 societies that are culturally and socioeconomically diverse. We report the society scores for SVS values dimensions for both individual- and societallevel analyses. At the individual-level, we report on the ten circumplex values sub-dimensions and two sets of values dimensions (collectivism and individualism; openness to change, conservation, self-enhancement, and self- transcendence). At the societal-level, we report on the values dimensions of embeddedness, hierarchy, mastery, affective autonomy, intellectual autonomy, egalitarianism, and harmony. For each society, we report the Cronbach’s a statistics for each values dimension scale to assess their internal consistency (reliability) as well as report interrater agreement (IRA) analyses to assess the acceptability of using aggregated individual level values scores to represent country values. We also examined whether societal development level is related to systematic variation in the measurement and importance of values. Thus, the contributions of our evaluation of the SVS values dimensions are two-fold. First, we identify the SVS dimensions that have cross-culturally internally reliable structures and withinsociety agreement for business professionals. Second, we report the society cultural values scores developed from the twenty-first century data that can be used as macro-level predictors in multilevel and single-level international business research

Societal-level versus individual-level predictions of ethical behavior: a 48-society study of collectivism and individualism

Is the societal-level of analysis sufficient today to understand the values of those in the global workforce? Or are individual-level analyses more appropriate for assessing the influence of values on ethical behaviors across country workforces? Using multi-level analyses for a 48-society sample, we test the utility of both the societal-level and individual-level dimensions of collectivism and individualism values for predicting ethical behaviors of business professionals. Our values-based behavioral analysis indicates that values at the individual-level make a more significant contribution to explaining variance in ethical behaviors than do values at the societal-level. Implicitly, our findings question the soundness of using societal-level values measures. Implications for international business research are discussed