When organizational relocation means family relocation: An emerging issue for strategic human resource management

Relocations of entire organizational units raise special family adjustment issues. This article reports on the reactions of employees and their families to such a relocation. Employees' adjustment was more strongly related to nonwork and family impacts of the move than to factors in the workplace. Adjustment was more difficult for families inexperienced in relocation, despite extensive company assistance programs.     

Emerging Profiles of Polish Outward Foreign Direct Investment

In this study, the authors identify the emerging profiles of Poland's outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) at the macro- and micro-levels and propose relevant policy measures. They also set up a theoretical framework for further investigation of the identified trends and patterns. Both types of analysis—macro and micro—point to a regional focus of Poland's OFDI on Europe and to a sectoral concentration on services, followed by manufacturing. At the same time, the micro-analysis reveals a dominant role of a few largest Polish multinationals in the country's OFDI.     

Recurrent Marketing Decisions: Decision Complexity,Decision Focus,and Firm Performance

In this paper we examine the nature of the decision-making process for recurrent marketing decisions and its effects on firm performance. A conceptual model of recurrent decision-making in a competitive environment is developed and used as a framework for analyzing 96 tactical decisions made by 35 management groups in the last three periods of a management simulation. The decisions were based entirely on a set of decision rules developed by the management groups. The decision rules were coded for whether they were internally or externally focused and how complex their decision process was. These two factors were then used to predict firm performance. There are a number of important results. The greater the uncertainty in the link between a decision variable and its outcome, i) the more likely managers are to prespecify the value of the decision variable rather than construct a decision rule, ii) the less complex the decision rules that are constructed, and iii) the greater the proportion of internally-focused decision rules. In addition, the focus of a decision rule, but not the complexity of the process—independent of the focus—is positively related to performance with firms that focus on both internal and external factors doing best.     

Diet diversity,malnutrition and health: Evidence from Kenya

We investigate the effects of diet diversity on health outcomes indicated by the body-mass index (BMI) of Kenyan women in their reproductive age (15–49 years). We estimate the demand for diet diversity (which is a proxy for diet quality) and analyse its relationship with BMI by allowing the effect of diet diversity to vary along the conditional BMI distribution. Results show that diet diversity is associated with a beneficial effect on the lower and upper tails of the BMI distribution, that is, dietary diversity improves BMI for underweight individuals while, at the same time, it reduces BMI for overweight/obese individuals. Specifically, doubling the diet diversity is associated with a 14.7% increase in BMI for underweight women and a 7.0% reduction in BMI of obese women. These results support the hypothesis that diet diversity is associated with optimal BMI and, thus, better health, contributing to the policy discourse concerning the double burden of malnutrition in developing countries.