Cross-cultural management education rebooted: creating positive value through scientific mindfulness

Graduates of cross-cultural management (CCM) courses should be capable of both tackling international and cross-cultural situations and creating positive value from the diversity inherent in these situations. Such value creation is challenging because these situations are typically complex due to differences in cultural values, traditions, social practices and institutions, such as legal rules, coupled with variation in, for example, wealth and civil rights among stakeholders. We argue that a scientific mindfulness approach to teaching CCM can help students identify and leverage positive aspects of differences and thereby contribute to positive change in crosscultural situations. This new approach combines mindfulness and scientific thinking with the explicit goal to drive positive change in the world. We explain how the action principles of scientific mindfulness enable learners to build positive value from cultural diversity. We then describe the enactment of these principles in the context of CCM educatio

Sustainable change: long-term efforts toward developing a learning organization

Globalization and intensified competition require organizations to change and adapt to dynamic environments in order to stay competitive. This article describes a longitudinal action research study supporting the strategic change of a trading company. The strategic change was accompanied by planned changes in organizational structures and processes, management systems, emerging changes in leadership, and organization members’ attitudes and behaviors, and it was supported by management development activities. Longitudinal data over a 4-year period including participant observation and interviews reveal that a systemic approach, a learning and becoming perspective toward change, trust, an appropriate role perception, and the specific use of management instruments contribute to sustained change that resulted in performance improvements and a move toward a learning organization. We conclude with implications for strategic change and suggestions for further research in this area

Gender-Specific Effects of Unemployment on Family Formation: A Cross-National Perspective

This paper investigates the impact of unemployment on the propensity to start a family. Unemployment is accompanied by bad occupational prospects and impending economic deprivation, placing the well-being of a future family at risk. I analyze unemployment at the intersection of state-dependence and the reduced opportunity costs of parenthood, distinguishing between men and women across a set of welfare states. Using micro-data from the European Community Household Panel (ECHP), I apply event history methods to analyze longitudinal samples of first-birth transitions in France, Finland, Germany, and the UK (1994-2001). The results highlight spurious negative effects of unemployment on family formation among men, which can be attributed to the lack of breadwinner capabilities in the inability to financially support a family. Women, in contrast, show positive effects of unemployment on the propensity to have a first child in all countries except France. These effects prevail even after ontrolling for labour market and income-related factors. The findings are pronounced in Germany and the UK where work-family conflicts are the cause of high opportunity costs of motherhood, and the gender-specific division of labour is still highly traditional. Particularly among women with a moderate and low level of education, unemployment clearly increases the likelihood to have a first child

The Prospects of the Baby Boomers: Methodological Challenges in Projecting the Lives of an Aging Cohort

In most industrialized countries, the work and family patterns of the baby boomers characterized by more heterogeneous working careers and less stable family lives set them apart from preceding cohorts. Thus, it is of crucial importance to understand how these different work and family lives are linked to the boomers' prospective material well-being as they retire. This paper presents a new and unique matching-based approach for the projection of the life courses of German baby boomers, called the LAW-Life Projection Model. Basis for the projection are data from 27 waves of the German Socio-Economic Panel linked with administrative pension records from the German Statutory Pension In-surance that cover lifecycle pension-relevant earnings. Unlike model-based micro simula-tions that age the data year by year our matching-based projection uses sequences from older birth cohorts to complete the life-courses of statistically similar baby boomers through to retirement. An advantage of this approach is to coherently project the work-life and family trajectories as well as lifecycle earnings. The authors present a benchmark anal-ysis to assess the validity and accuracy of the projection. For this purpose, they cut a signif-icant portion of already lived lives and test different combinations of matching algorithms and donor pool specifications to identify the combination that produces the best fit be-tween previously cut but observed and projected life-course information. Exploiting the advantages of the projected data, the authors compare the returns to education - measured in terms of pension entitlements - across cohorts. The results indicate that within cohorts, differences between individuals with low and high educational attainment increase over time for men and women in East and West Germany. East German boomer women with low educational attainment face the most substantial losses in pension entitlements that put them at a high risk of being poor as they retire

Unternehmenskultur im Krankenhaus : Ansatzpunkt für ein Betriebliches Gesundheitsmanagement

Aufgrund veränderter Rahmenbedingungen und Organisationsstrukturen sind die Mitarbeiter im Krankenhaus zunehmend hohen körperlichen und psychischen Belastungen ausgesetzt. Gesunde Mitarbeiter stellen jedoch eine Grundvoraussetzung für die Leistungserstellung im Krankenhaus dar. Mit der Einführung eines Betrieblichen Gesundheitsmanagements wird das Ziel verfolgt, die Gesundheit der Mitarbeiter zu fördern und zu erhalten. Dies kann jedoch nur gelingen in einer Unternehmenskultur, die das Kulturelement der Gesundheit tief in seinem Wertesystem verankert hat. Der folgende Beitrag liefert Grundlagen zur Unternehmenskultur und erläutert die diesbezüglichen Gestaltungsmöglichkeiten des Krankenhausmanagements