Designing global leadership development programmes that promote social capital and knowledge sharing

This paper explores the role of Global Leadership Development (GLD) programmes for developing the social capital of multinational enterprises and ultimately the enhancement of knowledge sharing across corporate divisions and national borders. Drawing on both qualitative interview and survey data, we find that GLD programmes can promote cross-border knowledge sharing. However, the effects of such programmes depend on their design. We identify two factors crucial for social capital development and knowledge sharing: first, a selection issue related to participants’ previous experience with leadership programmes and, secondly, a process issue which concerns the quality of the social interaction in the group work

Individual-level rewards and appraisal: the influence of context

Individual performance rewards and individual performance appraisals are key elements of “calculative HRM.” As practices, they figure strongly in the most highly cited studies within strategic HRM research. However, these studies are generally located within a single, distinct context, the USA, a context in which there is an underlying assumption of firm latitude. Varieties of capitalism literature indicates that this assumption is inappropriate to the context of coordinated market economies of Europe. We review cross-national studies of the adoption of calculative HRM and observe a substantial influence of national context on its adoption by firms. In terms of how to conceive national context, we observe that recent research suggests that formal institutional influences are of more salience than informal influences. The relative importance of formal institutional influences has consequences for international management education that predominantly views context through a cultural lens. We further observe that recent research of the uptake of calculative HRM perceives context as a constraint rather than as a determinant. Regardless of context, managers have at least some latitude to implement calculative HRM practices. However, we suggest that their efforts need to be adapted to and sensitive to contextual constraints

Institutional change and regional development in China: the case of commodity trading markets

With this paper we explore how institutional changes have influenced the regional development of Yiwu City, East China. The regional development in Yiwu City can be regarded as constituting a specific model in transitional China, which revolves around the establishment, growth, and internationalization of the local commodity trading market. The success of the Yiwu model lies in the interaction between globalization, local institutions, and commodity trading markets. However, we argue that the strategic coupling perspective has its limitations in explaining the development trajectory of the Yiwu model. We develop an integrated paradigm of regional development located between new regionalism and global production networks by synthesizing Scott’s institutional framework. We identify a pronounced and long-established cultural–cognitive element in the entrepreneurial spirit of local people, which led to the establishment of a commodity trading market at the beginning of 1980s. However, the sustainable development of the Yiwu model needs to be supplemented by normative and regulative institutional pillars. We further argue that the developmental local state remains critical to the regional development in developing countries in terms of correcting market failure, encouraging entrepreneurship, and creating a competitive business environment to accommodate globalization

Effective boundary spanners in IJVs experiencing performance downturn

International joint ventures (IJVs) are defined by Chenet al. (2009, p. 1133) as “legally independent entities formed by two or more parent firms from different countries that share equity investments and consequent returns.” The basis of most IJV structures involves a multinational enterprise (MNE) and a local partner pooling their respective competitive advantages. Although IJVs are widespread, their success rate has been estimated to be no more than about 50 percent (Bamford et al., 2004) and there is evidence of particular difficulties for IJVs involving Chinese partners (Child & Yan, 2003). In short, because IJVs are prone to interpartner conflict (Hambrick et al., 2001), they are fundamentally unstable, with only a minority surviving beyond a few years (Kogut, 1989; Park & Ungson, 1997)

The influences on direct communication in British and Danish Firms: country, 'strategic HRM' or unionisation?

This article uses large-scale survey data to examine the influences on private-sector managers’ propensity to communicate directly to employees in Britain and Denmark. In both countries, this propensity is shaped by two factors: whether the senior HR manager is involved in strategy formation, and the degree of unionization. The findings are not consistent with Brewster’s argument that European HR managers are constrained in applying American versions of HRM, or with ‘varieties of capitalism’ theories which imply that companies in the two countries would have different systemic drivers of their communications practices

'Americanization' and the drivers of the establishment and use of works councils in three post-socialist countries

We question notions of the ‘Americanization’ of employment relations in Slovenia, Slovakia and Croatia. First, we examine the roles of unions, the use of US strategic approach to Human Resource Management (SHRM), and management perceptions of their organizations’ innovativeness in the establishment of Works Council (WCs). Second, we employ the same variables in relation to the use of WCs for downward communication in these countries in comparison with what Amable (2003) terms the Continental European Coordinated Market Economy (CECME) of Austria, adding the CECMEs Germany and Norway as control variables. Union influence drives the adoption of WCs and their use for management downward communication. Hence, on our measures the three countries share features of the CECME category and have not been “Americanized”

Functional-level transformation in multi-domestic MNCs: transforming local purchasing into globally integrated purchasing integrated purchasing

This paper revisits Bartlett and Ghoshal’s transnational theory of the MNC in relation to multi-domestic MNCs. We argue that the aggregate level of analysis adopted by Bartlett and Ghoshal is unhelpful for identifying significant changes in multi-domestic MNCs at the level of discrete functions. We argue that a more disaggregated level of analysis is required. Our analysis of two cases of multi-domestic MNCs that have undertaken the global integration of their locally distributed purchasing functions indicates that while significant change to the purchasing function has occurred, at the aggregate level both MNCs remain multi-domestic. In both cases the decision to integrate local purchasing was regarded as having more obvious benefits than integrating other functions such as marketing. While both of our case multi-domestic MNCs may in future choose to integrate other functions and develop into full-fledged transnational companies we argue that there is no inevitability to this. Indeed global integration may cease with the purchasing function. A second theme in this paper is that we argue that Bartlett and Ghoshal’s transnational theory has a biased view of what constitutes effective governance mechanisms for achieving global integration, local responsiveness and worldwide learning and that it would greatly benefit from a more balanced application of hierarchical and relational governance mechanisms

A framework for comparative institutional research on HRM

This article argues that awareness of institutional context has been singularly lacking in the most influential areas of HRM. This lack of attention to external context has resulted in findings that fail to reflect reality. We offer a layered contextual framework embedded in economic institutional theory. We propose that it forms the basis of a comparative research agenda for HRM. We validate the framework using extant publications on institutionally based comparative HRM, drawing on findings from the Cranet research network published in the decade 2007–2017

Successful and unsuccessful radical transformation of multinational mobile telephony companies: the role of institutional context

A number of prominent European multinational mobile telephony companies (MNMTCs) have their origins in state-owned monopolies that successfully undertook radical transformation in the late 1980s to late 1990s. Not only did they face liberalization of their domestic markets but they also moved from fixed-line telephony to mobile telephony prior to rapid expanded overseas. Our study focuses on Telenor whose operations currently span the Nordic region and Southeast Asia. Like other MNMTCs, Telenor currently faces another period of radical change as global digital services providers are set to ride on the connectivity MNMTCs supply thereby reducing them to “dumb-pipes”. Our study indicates that Telenor has abandoned radical transformation for “modernization” of its extant operations. For an understanding of why this second radical change is proving arduous for MNMTCs, we argue that there is a need to take into consideration institutional change

Context and HRM: theory, evidence, and proposals

Human resource management (HRM) has paid insufficient attention to the impact of context. In this article, we outline the need for HRM to take full account of context, particularly national context, and to use both cultural theories and, particularly, institutional theories to do that. We use research publications that utilize the Cranet data to show how that can be done. From that evidence, we develop a series of proposals for further context-based research in HRM