Cross-Cultural Management Studies: State of the Field in the Four Research Paradigms*

The impact of organizational politics on work engagement-the mediating role of the doctrine of the mean

Introduction

Events Theory posits that the perception of organizational politics affects job attitudes. The purpose of this study was to answer the question: does organizational politics have a similar impact on Chinese individuals who adhere to the doctrine of the mean?

Methods

We collected survey data from 3,059 library personnel in 36 Chinese university libraries and conducted analysis using the Analytic Hierarchy Process.

Results

The results showed that the perception of organizational politics reduces employee work engagement. However, this impact exhibits heterogeneity. For newly recruited employees and employees aged 50 and above who are nearing retirement, the impact of organizational politics on work engagement is relatively small. Conversely, for employees aged 30-50, organizational politics has a significant negative impact. Furthermore, the doctrine of the mean moderates the impact of organizational politics on work engagement, mitigating its negative effects.

Discussion

The conclusions offer new insights into enhancing employee work motivation. The library should take more measures to safeguard employee rights to enhance work motivation.

Organizations and migrant integration: Towards a multiparadigm narrative approach

This paper explores the potential of conducting multiparadigm research within and beyond cross-cultural management, using narratives to examine how organizations shape migrant integration experiences and trajectories. It highlights the strengths of paradigmatic multiplicity in research with examples of three illustrative studies respectively using functionalist, interpretive and critical perspectives, while also considering the boundaries of these individual approaches. The paper proceeds to explore the potential of adopting a multiparadigm approach within a research strategy that places narratives at the centre of enquiry. It identifies the scope and focus of future research for a socially and politically important area of enquiry; it evaluates the application of diverse paradigm-driven methodological perspectives including the challenges involved in using them alone and in combination; and it develops a transferable framework to guide research in cross-cultural management, organization and migration studies that helps to assure procedural and conceptual rigour, and to generate practicable insights that facilitate successful integration outcomes.

The Criterion Problem in Cross-Cultural Performance Research

The criterion problem is a serious conceptual and methodological challenge that has confronted investigators and managers in the organizational sciences for over 100 years. This paper is an introduction to the criterion problem and some of the complex, multifaceted issues it encompasses. It defines and discusses important concepts (e.g. the problem itself, conceptual criteria, operational criteria). It explores broad dilemmas that afflict all types of criteria and narrower dilemmas that are more individually relevant to criteria traditionally considered objective or subjective. It concludes by examining prospects for the criterion problem both in general and within cross-cultural management.

Intermediary Management and Employee Corporate Culture Identification Mediation and Mediation Effect Verification

This exploration is mainly performed to study the role of corporate culture accepted by employees in enterprise development and its impact on employees themselves. First, the influence of employee participation, cross-cultural management, and corporate culture on the enterprise is realized through the relevant literature. Then, investigation and analysis are carried out with American I Industrial Group as the research object to determine the impact of cross-cultural management on mergers and acquisitions and organizational performance. The results show that the total impact of trust on reuse is 0.264 before mergers and acquisitions; the difference is not statistically significant, and so is the overall impact of mergers and acquisitions. This means that there is no correlation between trust and reuse. However, when the merger is done, the total effect of trust on reuse rises to 1.594, indicating that the difference and the total effect are statistically significant. The data calculation and analysis for the direct impact of trust on reuse and the indirect impact of trust on reuse are 0.667 and 0.926, respectively, which means that the difference is statistically significant. This proves the role of satisfaction in the impact of trust on reuse once mergers and acquisitions are completed. Therefore, in the process of mergers and acquisitions in the future, enterprises must consider the different cultures of employees and company locations and employee participation, which will further affect the organizational performance of enterprises.

Learning from multi-paradigmatic sensitivity in cross-cultural management? Empirical and theoretical considerations

Paradigms are basic assumptions about how social reality is perceived, understood and explained. Whereas most research is based on a single paradigm, few empirical papers show the advantages of using multiple paradigms within a study. This article pleads for multi-paradigm studies in cross-cultural management research in order to reach a more multifaceted representation of cultural phenomena. This is particularly consistent with the field of cross-cultural management, because it would be ethnocentric to consider intercultural situations only from one perspective, usually that of one’s own culture. The argument corresponds to the ambition of cross-cultural management to respect and adopt multiple (cultural) perspectives and, analogously, to achieve a ‘paradigmatic ethnorelativism’. Based on an intercultural situation, and therefore going beyond meta-theoretical reasoning, this article demonstrates multi-paradigmatic sensitivity in terms of the functionalist, interpretive and critical paradigms. The use of these theoretical concepts leads to multiple angles and a less ‘ethnocentric’ position, and hence to more nuanced knowledge creation with regard to the intercultural situation. The ‘blind spots’ of each paradigm, but also their complementarities, are discussed. Consequently, this article raises theoretical and practical implications for cross-cultural management by offering a way to a richer understanding of intercultural situations through openness to different paradigms.

Ethically questionable negotiation tactics: the differential roles of national, societal and individual cultural values

Purpose

The purpose of this study is to refine theory of negotiation by empirically investigating the extent to which national-, societal- and individual-level cultures relate to negotiators' tendency to endorse questionable negotiation tactics.

Design/methodology/approach

To assess the hypothesized relationships between culture and ethically questionable negotiation tactics at three cultural levels of analysis, the authors collected data from Turks who reside in Turkey and in Germany and from Greeks who reside in Greece and in Cyprus. Respondents' national-level cultural values were inferred from their nationality, respondents' societal-level cultural values were inferred from their country of residency, and respondents' individual-level cultural values were inferred from their discrete and unique individuality.

Findings

At the national level, the authors found that Turks in Turkey and Germany scored significantly higher than Greeks in Greece and Cyprus on the endorsement of pretending negotiation tactics. At the societal level, the authors found that Turkish negotiators in Germany displayed higher levels of lying negotiation tactics and lower levels of pretending negotiation tactics than Turkish negotiators in Turkey. Greek negotiators in Greece endorsed deceiving and lying tactics more than Greek negotiators in Cyprus. At the individual level, the authors found that negotiators who score high on vertical individualism and collectivism endorse questionable negotiation tactics significantly more than negotiators who score high on horizontal individualism and collectivism.

Originality/value

The authors empirically demonstrate how national-, societal- and individual-level cultures differentially influence negotiators' tendency to endorse questionable negotiation tactics. The study's trilevel analysis allows for integrating the societal-level theories of negotiators' acculturation and cultural adjustment to a host culture, highlighting the importance of bicultural identity.

The influence of intercultural management factors as elements of management innovation

In the current globalization conditions, companies operate in an open environment and constant contact with foreign managers and other interest groups. Intercultural management is an integral and important part of any international company employing and cooperating with employees from different cultures. The proper implementation of intercultural management enables the innovation of employee relations and thus supports achieving the company's goals. This paper aims to examine the influences and relations between local and foreign employees and/or managers. Research on intercultural communication and management was conducted in IT companies by collecting questionnaire data from respondents, formulating hypotheses, and examining them through the Kruskal-Wallis test. Hypotheses verification stated that statistically significant differences are in the relation between the knowledge of the company's cultural differences and the employees' years of experience. The calculated value of p = 0.04728 proved that the longer the employees work in a company interconnecting different cultures, the greater their knowledge of its cultural differences. The research verified the hypothesis on statistically significant differences in the acceptance of cultural differences in the company concerning employee training. The result of the hypothesis verification was the value of p = 0.6539, which did not confirm the hypothesis. The research showed that the employee training did not affect the acceptance of cultural differences. In companies with a labor force from diverse countries and cultures, disputes often arise in communication. The last formulated hypothesis concerning the issue focused on examining the relationship between the acceptance of disputes based on cultural differences in the company and the employee training. The calculated value of p = 0.1 did not confirm this relationship. Therefore, the employee training does not affect the acceptance of disputes in the examined companies. The present research on intercultural management could expand knowledge and innovate relationships to prevent disputes in international companies.

Work design expectations of Japanese MNCs’ local managers in English-speaking and Far East cultural clusters – USA, Thailand and India

Purpose

The importance of work design to organizational engagement and firm performance is increasingly recognized in management scholarship. For international business, a majority of variation in work design based on national cultures is addressed through cross-cultural management scholarship. However, there is a paucity of qualitative research on the influences international business human resource managers face for work design in the intercultural environment of overseas subsidiaries. The purpose of this interpretivist study was to examine the lived experience of overseas subsidiaries’ local managers to surface a more nuanced understanding of their expectations and related implications for work.

Design/methodology/approach

Empirical research was conducted through semistructured in-depth interviews with senior managers of subsidiaries of Japanese MNCs in USA, Thailand and India.

Findings

The findings of the study develop and extend on prior cross-cultural management scholarship on world cultural clusters revealing changed expectations of work in intercultural work environments as instantiated by Japanese MNCs.

Social implications

Through engaging work design, international businesses can contribute to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 8 that pertains to decent work.

Originality/value

The study adds to extant understanding of the work design antecedent to engagement by broadening to intercultural environment impacts understanding facilitated by empirical lived experience data and suggesting a modification to extant theory. This study pioneers in taking world cultural clusters as the field for evaluating data.

Workforce diversity, diversity training and ethnic minorities: The case of the UK National Health Service

This research studied an NHS organization as a case to explore how it is responding to cross-cultural issues against a backdrop of policy expectations about equitable and good quality mental health service provision to service users of a minority ethno-cultural group in the UK. Data were collected by conducting semi-structured interviews with 20 participants from three hierarchical levels of the organization. The research found that the concepts of culture and ethnicity are used in a fixed way in the interventions (staff diversity training and ethnic matching) taken by the case organization. It is argued that this fixed understanding of cultural concepts and related interventions may not be helpful in meeting the needs of service users, especially in the context of United Kingdom, which is characterized as a super-diverse society. It appears that the interventions are developed and implemented on the conceptualization of cultural identity as generic and fixed. Organizations working in a multicultural society, or where they have service users from a variety of ethnic and cultural backgrounds, need to develop and implement interventions based on individualized and fluid understanding of such concepts. The findings of this study contribute to cross-cultural management scholarship by taking a critical stance on the concept of culture, as it is operationalized by a large organization. We show how, even when required by national policy, this one-dimensional model of culture causes human resource management interventions, intended to address cultural diversity, to be perceived as ineffective.

Positivist, constructivist and critical approaches to international human resource management and some future directions

International human resource management has become a mature discipline in the last 30 years. As a sub-discipline of social sciences, international human resource management is characterised by paradigmatic divisions. The aim of this review article is to map the presence of three dominant social science paradigms in the field. Four major journals which publish relevant studies of international human resource management have been analysed in order to give an overview of the paradigmatic state of play. After investigating 1649 articles, it is evident that positivist studies prevail, whereas constructivist works are in a minority. Critical approaches to international human resource management are largely absent in these journals. This paper presents examples of each type of research and explains the decisive characteristics of each paradigm. Finally, future directions are outlined: (1) more paradigm reflexivity is required, (2) non-mainstream (namely, constructivist and even critical) research is needed, and (3) new paradigmatic directions are recommended. Newly introduced paradigms or multiparadigm studies should be undertaken.

Insider status: (Re)framing researcher positionality in international human resource management studies

Insider researchers in international human resource management study not only the organisations or communities they may be members of, but also the people they perceive closeness with or with whom they share identities. The research context for insiders is rich but rarely problem-free. The uncertainty and dynamism of insider research often leaves insider researchers grappling with methodological and ethical challenges, but with no explicit framework to guide how they can be addressed in research practice or research reporting. Indeed, the ‘sanitised’ methodologies appearing in published work often do not reflect the complexity of the authors’ experience. In this article, we call for researchers to give more explicit consideration of what it means to research from an insider position, regardless of the research paradigm from which they work. The article addresses some of the messy details of insider research, drawing on personal accounts of our own research practice. We offer a framework of researcher personae as a tool for reflecting upon researchers’ insider positionality before, during and after data have been collected and analysed. Overall, we encourage researchers working from insider positions to adopt three practices: (1) to engage in reflexive consideration of the effects of (changing) positionality on their work as a way to strengthen the ethical and theoretical outcomes of research practice; (2) to acknowledge and leverage, rather than conceal, insiderness as a key strategy for making feasible more research on sensitive and ‘taboo’ topics; and (3) to make positionality explicit in research reporting in order to enhance the quality of insider research as well as enhance fieldwork learning more generally in the international human resource management field. While the personal accounts we share in this article are based on our research within the field of international human resource management, the intention is that it may also be of value to researchers in other fields.

Ethnographic studies in international human resource management: Types and usefulness

This article provides a first conceptual discussion of the usefulness of ethnography for International Human Resource Management. In line with its original anthropological meaning, ethnography is understood as a multi-paradigmatic mindset involving five interrelated strands, all of which have the potential to contribute to International Human Resource Management studies. Structural-functionalist ethnography enables deep comparison and can thus contribute, for instance, to meeting the structural and institutional integration challenges of International Human Resource Management. Interpretive ethnography sheds light onto the hidden realities of International Human Resource Management and can thus help, for example, to acknowledge the diversity of employee and stakeholder experiences. Critical, postmodern, and postcolonial ethnography reveal the power-inequalities associated with diverse frameworks, practices, and work experiences in a global context. They can thus help overcome the inherent power-inequalities of International Human Resource Management and might utilize previously marginalized knowledge for the development of alternative International Human Resource Management strategies and practices. Yet, leveraging the full potential of ethnography for International Human Resource Management studies requires International Human Resource Management scholars not to borrow pre-selected ethnographic approaches, such as interpretive ethnography, from related disciplines, such as International Business and Cross-Cultural Management, because these might not fit the specific needs of International Human Resource Management. For facilitating this goal, this article provides a first multi-paradigmatic discussion of the development and principles of ethnography in anthropology, and its present and potential contributions to International Human Resource Management studies. It is not a guide of how to do ethnography, but a roadmap enabling future International Human Resource Management researchers to choose their ethnographic research strategy consciously, reflexively, and as their research interest demands for.

Gender relations in the workplace: The experience of female managers in African harbours

Scholarship on women in management has been dominated by White Western women, rendering African women management research largely invisible. Consequently, we know very little about female managers in African contexts. This study advances knowledge of the career obstacles, work–life balance issues and leadership styles of African women leaders, by presenting testimonies based on exploratory qualitative interviews with 26 female port managers from two North African countries and eight sub-Saharan countries. The findings show that the interviewees in this sample are not subjugated women on the periphery of their societies. Rather, they are active agents who are capable of producing effective professional identities and mostly represent middle- or upper-class women in their societies. Although they face similar issues as those identified in previous women in management literature, including subtle or overt discrimination, work–life balance difficulties and a lack of recognition from male counterparts, their situation differs slightly from those in the West owing to their cultural, historical and religious context.

When the ‘well-oiled machine’ meets the ‘pyramid of people:’ Role perceptions and hybrid working practices of middle managers in a binational organization – ARTE

This article examines the middle management representations of organization and managerial roles within a specific bicultural organizational context. The argument explores the extant cross-cultural management literature and identifies two predominant positions: a functionalist-stable stance and a dynamically interpretive perspective of culture. Historically, both positions have contributed to understanding management roles and behaviours in different cross-cultural contexts; however, each also possesses limitations. In response, the argument elaborates a multi-paradigmatic model and framework that synergise elements of the respective approaches. An interpretive methodology using a distinctive qualitative case study of the Franco-German collaborative media venture ARTE is developed. The researchers conducted 31 interviews with French and German ARTE middle managers in order to determine their perceptions of middle-manager roles in this context. The article identified differences in managerial role perceptions and behaviours as well as hybrid working practices as a result of intercultural adaptation and learning in addition to implications, limitations and future directions in the study.

Cross-cultural management research: Topics, paradigms, and methods—A journal-based longitudinal analysis between 2001 and 2018

Cross-cultural management (CCM) research comprises a variety of disciplines with different thematic, paradigmatic, and methodological assumptions. Since there has been no systematic analysis of the development of topics, paradigms, and methods, this article draws a landscape of these analyzing 777 articles published in two leading journals between 2001 and 2018. Results show that corporate culture, human resource management, and cultural dimensions are main topics in CCM and that positivist and quantitative papers outweigh interpretive and qualitative articles. We examine a convergence of the positivist and interpretive paradigm in 2016 and 2017, what might indicate a possible upcoming paradigmatic shift in CCM. However, positivist articles rise again since 2017. Using computer-aided tools, this study serves as a basis for future literature reviews.

Constructions of inclusion at two senior nursing home units in Sweden: immigrants’ perspectives

Purpose

This study is an inductive exploration of factors that are relevant to the inclusion and integration of immigrant workers in a Swedish workplace. The purpose of this paper is to examine the experiences of immigrant employees with other organisational actors at two senior nursing units in Sweden.

Design/methodology/approach

Results are drawn from the analyses of interviews with six female and three male immigrant nursing assistants living permanently in Sweden.

Findings

Trustful relationships with other organisational actors, during both formal and informal interactions, are considered essential facilitating inclusion of these immigrant workers. Immigrant workers experienced inclusion when they achieved language competence (or felt supported in their attempts to do so) and bridged cultural differences. The results also highlight conditions for interactions and leadership as factors influencing inclusion. In addition, inclusion implied acculturation or awareness of the values of native-born citizens.

Research limitations/implications

The study suggests that immigrants’ relational dynamics with their colleagues are essential to inclusion, despite types of studies that focus mainly on the competences of leaders to manage diversity.

Practical implications

The results have implications for organisations’ development of a more democratic workplace with more inclusiveness and with satisfied employees.

Originality/value

The study gives voice to immigrant workers, which is rare in Swedish and international organisations that deal with the issue of immigrant integration in the workplace.