Talent or Not? Employee Reactions to Talent Identification

In this article, we examine the effect of talent identification on employee attitudes. Building on social exchange theory, we analyze the association between employees' perceptions about whether or not they have been formally identified as “talent” and the following attitudinal outcomes: commitment to increasing performance demands, building skills, and supporting strategic priorities; identification with the unit and the multinational enterprise; and turnover intentions. Our analyses of 769 managers and professionals in nine Nordic multinational corporations reveal a number of differences between employees who perceive that they have been identified as “talent” and those who either perceive that they have not been identified or do not know whether they have been identified. We found only limited differences between the two latter categories.     

Ethnic segmentation in leisure time activities in Estonia

This paper examines the differences between the leisure time activities of members of the minority and majority populations of Estonia. Because people only meet when they undertake similar activities, it is important for social cohesion to identify the kinds of activities that different ethnic groups engage in during their free time. The data for this study were obtained from the Estonian Time Use Surveys of 2000 and 2010. In this paper, we analyse rates of participation in various cultural events, entertainment activities, outdoor recreation and sport. Our analysis reveals important ethnic differences in almost all leisure activities that partly stem from the uneven distribution of minorities over settlement types. Less than half of the differences relate to socio-economic status and individual wealth. The rest of ethnic segmentation in leisure activities can be attributed to preferences, differential residential patterns of ethnic groups over Estonia’s regions and the feeling of being a stranger in leisure time places where other ethnic groups are already over-represented.     

Team autonomy,organizational commitment and company performance – a study in the retail trade

The study focuses on the relationship between perceived team autonomy and company performance through highlighting organizational commitment as a mediating factor in this relationship. Data collected in 2007 came from 25 small-sized companies in the retail trade, covering both the employer and employee levels (n = 369). This study aims to shed light on the following questions: first, is team autonomy associated with organizational commitment and company performance? Second, does commitment mediate the relationship between team autonomy and company performance? Results indicated that team autonomy was both directly and indirectly positively associated with company performance. Furthermore, organizational commitment partially mediated the relationship between team autonomy and company performance. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Good practice in multicultural integration work in Finland: collaborative learning in culturally sensitive projects

Finland is undergoing a rapid change from a homogenous culture to a heterogeneous culture. With immigrants from all over the world making Finland their home, a lot of multicultural integration work is needed. Collaborative learning in peer groups can work as a useful framework for enhancing tolerance toward differences, and consumer education and home economics education offer a fruitful setting for this kind of collaborative teaching of tolerance. In particular, the practical nature of consumer education and home economics makes it suitable to teach multiculturalism in a daily life setting. In this study, 10 integration projects in Finland were examined through a qualitative summary to reveal the key elements in successful multicultural integration work. The focus was on multicultural, collaborative interactions. The results show that problems are bound to arise when people from different cultures meet. Daily life situations, culturally unequal settings, poor participation and a lack of real interaction between different cultural groups can be problematic. These problems need to be overcome before the richness of different cultures can be revealed. People need to learn how to use the tools of multicultural and collaborative learning before the group can act successfully.     

When Does University Research Get Commercialized? Creating Ambidexterity in Research Institutions

We examine the tensions that make it difficult for a research‐oriented university to achieve commercial outcomes. Building on the organizational ambidexterity literature, we specify the nature of the tensions (between academic and commercially‐oriented activities) at both organizational and individual levels of analysis, and how these can be resolved. We develop hypotheses linking specific aspects of the organization and the individual researcher to the likelihood of their research projects generating commercial outcomes, and we test them using a novel dataset of 207 Research Council‐funded projects, combining objective data on project outcomes with the perceptions of principal investigators. We show that the tension between academic and commercial demands is more salient at the level of the individual researcher than at the level of the organization. Universities show evidence that they are able to manage the tensions between academic and commercial demands, through for example their creation of ‘dual structures’. At the individual level, on the other hand, the tensions are more acute, so that the people who deliver commercial outcomes tend to be rather different to those who are accustomed to producing academic outcomes.     

Interpersonal similarity and knowledge sharing within multinational organizations

Previous research has established that interpersonal similarity can influence knowledge sharing in such a way that similar people are more likely to share knowledge than those who are dissimilar. We contribute to the literature by showing that in the MNC context, cultural and functional similarity can become more powerful sources of bias than more commonly assumed demographic characteristics such as gender or seniority. This may be driven by the salience of such boundaries in the MNC: while demographic characteristics are more broadly distributed, cultural and functional barriers create more defined and observable faultlines, often coinciding with unit boundaries. We further argue that it may not be similarity as such that matters but rather its positive impact on different dimensions of social capital, which mediate the relationship between similarity and knowledge sharing. These microfoundations of inter-unit knowledge exchange point to important theoretical and practical implications for international management.     

Endorsing Sustainable Food Consumption: Prospects from Public Catering

The aim of this article was to analyse an attempt to promote sustainable consumption by shaping the conditions for consumption. In particular, the focus lies on sustainable public catering as an approach to shaping both the supply of and demand for sustainable meals. In order to capture the processes of governing consumption, the way is traced in which rationalities (ways of thinking and calculating), technologies (means and instruments), visibilities (concrete manifestations), and identities (types of agents assumed) related to a policy intervention for sustainable public catering are interpreted and recreated by three main groups of actors involved: policy makers, catering professionals, and consumers. This analysis highlights the active role of practitioners in realizing policies for sustainable consumption. It has implications for policy makers and analysts: Reflexive policies should heed to actors’ unfolding interpretations as they can take the policy process in different directions.     

A comparison of Likert-type rating and visually-aided rating in a simple moral judgment experiment

A simple experiment was designed to test two different means of rating: Likert-type rating and visually aided rating (VAR). Using both rating methods 182 young female respondents passed judgments on moral transgressions described in short stories. The respondents were randomly assigned to one of two experiment groups, those who rated the stories from the point of view of an observer (N =?90) and those who rated them from the point of view of the actor (N =?92). The result of the comparison was that the VARs yielded more robust results than the Likert ratings in the statistical tests between the experiment groups. As for the moral judgment experiment, unexpectedly, the ratings of others were more lenient than self-ratings.     

How do MNCs establish their talent pools? Influences on individuals’ likelihood of being labeled as talent

Addressing the research question of what influences the likelihood of an individual being labeled as ‘talent’ in MNCs, this paper seeks to understand the decision processes involved in the identification of MNC-internal talent. We develop a framework suggesting that the decision to include an employee in a corporate talent pool is a two-stage decision process in which mostly experience-based (on-line) performance appraisal evaluations are used as an input in largely cognition-based (off-line) managerial decision making. Consequently, talent pool inclusion is determined not only by performance appraisal evaluations, but also a number of factors that influence the decision making in the second stage of the talent identification process. Using empirical insights from an in-depth case study as illustrations, we identify three such factors—cultural and institutional distance between the locations of a potential member of the talent pool and the decision makers; homophily between the individual and the decision makers; and the network position of the person in question.