Corporate environmental behaviour – a comparison between Nordic and US firms

The green challenge will be one of the key strategic issues facing businesses in the coming decades. Some argue that it is important for mankind as a whole. In this article the opinions of Nordic and US managers on environmental matters are investigated and compared. A questionnaire was sent to senior managers mainly in four industries: forest and paper, electronics, telecommunications and the printing industry. The results show that US managers perceive government laws and actions to be more stringent than Nordic managers do and the time to adapt was felt to be too short. There were no differences between the two regions in the degree of pro‐activeness and environmental innovation. However US managers reported a shortage of skilled labour. Managers both in the Nordic countries and the USA considered themselves to be ahead of their competitors in environmental actions. Nordic managers were much more positive toward the competitive effects and profitability of environmental measures than their US counterparts. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

Propensity for participative decision making in Latin America: Mexico and Peru

Increased subordinate participation in management decisions has been a recognized trend in developed Western organizations in recent decades. This study examines a manager's propensity for engaging in participative decision making (PPDM)in two emerging Latin American nations, Mexico and Peru. Although these two nations possess some degree of cultural similarity, two key differences were identified. First, Mexican managers who believed that PDM reduces a manager's power base were also likely than others to see a positive link between PDM and organizational effectiveness. In contrast, Peruvian managers who believed that PDM reduces a manager's power base were less likely than others to see a positive link between PDM and organizational effectiveness. Second, Mexican managers operating in participative organizational cultures were less committed than other managers to participation as a management philosophy and to their organizations. In contrast, Peruvian managers operating in participative organizational cultures were more committed than other managers to participation and to their organizations. Conclusions and directions for future research are also presented.     

Cross-national differences in cognitive style: implications for management

An important obstacle to productive working relationships between managers from different countries may be cross-cultural variations in cognitive style. This study examined the traditional dichotomy between the 'intuitive' East and the rational or 'analytic' West. A total of 394 managers from six nations and 360 management students from five nations completed the Cognitive Style Index, a self-report measure of the intuitive-analytic dimension. Reliability coefficients suggested that the properties of the instrument are broadly consistent across cultures. Comparison of mean scores showed that the most intuitive groups were located in the Anglo, North European and European Latin slices of Hickson and Pugh's 'culture cake', and the most analytic were in the Developing Countries and Arab categories. On the basis of these findings, it is argued that it may be more fruitful to classify nations in terms of their stage of industrial development rather than the hemisphere in which they are located. Ways of overcoming difficulties in encounters between managers from different cultures may include training in how to identify, respond to and change cognitive styles, and the selection of individuals or management teams whose styles are compatible with those of their foreign counterparts.     

What motivates employees? A comparison of US and Chinese responses

Differences in culture, history, economy, and political and management systems may lead to differences in employee job attribute preferences across countries. To the extent that this is true, managers and designers of motivation systems must understand the preferences of local employees. This study provides information on the job attribute preferences of Chinese employees at a major international hotel in Shanghai. Employee preference data were compared to published results from other nations. The pattern of preferences in China was unique compared to Russia, Taiwan and the United States. Chinese employees felt that good wages were most important, followed by good working conditions and personal loyalty from the boss and organization. Interesting work was relatively unimportant, especially to older employees, and 'being in on things' was not at all important. Supervisors at the hotel also provided information on the preferences which they believed characterized their subordinates. Unlike US managers who often badly misperceive the preferences of their US subordinates, Chinese supervisors accurately reported their subordinates' preferences. Expatriates in the hotel were much less accurate in ranking local subordinate preferences. Implications for motivating and managing Chinese employees are discussed.     

Differences in work goals among regions of the Netherlands and Germany: functional,institutional and critical event influences

We use World Values Survey data from the Netherlands and Germany to compare the importance of within-nation region differences with nation differences in work goals. These two nations have historical relationships and internal differences that are especially useful for testing hypotheses about nation compared to within-nation region differences. We develop hypotheses about the implications of religious heritage and urbanization for work goals based on functional, institutional and critical event explanations for regional culture differences. A number of work goals (notably extrinsic goals like pay) show too little difference between either nations or within-nation regions to consider them. For those work goals that do show region differences, the largest differences, those for job security goals and goals for working with pleasant people, are associated with region differences between rather than within the two nations. Regional differences in some work goals are also related to religious heritage. Regional differences in work goals have implications for the kinds of HR programs that managers may wish to promote in different locations. For example, the results suggest that HR managers have reason to anticipate that policies promoting job security may receive especially positive responses in Germany, whereas programs promoting social relationships may be best received in the Netherlands. Similarly, organizations that operate in both the north and south of each country should be alert to a number of possible within-nation differences in local optimal HR policies, but the within-nation differences found here are small enough that they should be carefully checked in specific organizations.     

The competitive advantage of nations: the role of HRM and its socio-cultural context

This study focuses on the links between human resource management practices and the socio-cultural characteristics of nations, on the one hand, and their competitive advantage in the international market, on the other. The particularly important conclusion is that some nations' cultures offer their managers a higher repertoire of modes of management practices than some others. In high repertoire nations, organizations appear to be better equipped to compete internationally than their counterparts in low repertoire nations.     

Comparisons of aggregation procedures for interaction data: An illustration using a college student international flow table

Various approaches for developing regional schemes on the basis of geographic interaction data are discussed, using a 46 × 46 international flow table of college students as an example. The hierarchical clustering procedure employed by Masser and Brown to study movement data for London and Liverpool is compared with that utilized by Slater to analyze internal migration in several nations and is found to be more successful in the sense of explained interaction, a criterion Masser and Brown maximize in a stepwise—not necessarily optimal—manner. Slater's method, however, appears to be less subject to chaining—the sequential growth of a cluster— and more productive of distinct subgroups. It can also be interpreted as the fitting of a tree structure to a dissimilarity matrix. Both techniques are shown to yield highly significant functional regions, by comparing their results with those obtained through a large number of random partitionings of the 46 nations. The substantial value of the Ford-Fulkerson network flow algorithm in optimal partitioning and hierarchical clustering is discussed. This algorithm can also be used to define nodal in- and out-migration regions—i.e. collections of nations that have fewer people entering or leaving them as a whole than their nodal nations. To determine functional regions, the flow table is first doubly-standardized to have all row and column sums equal. Nodal regions—which cannot be hierarchically ordered—are found through study of the unadjusted flows themselves. Political, linguistic and geographic influences explain many of the international groupings obtained.     

Capturing judgments to clarify production strategy and policy

Recent years have brought a reawakening of the importance of shaping the operations function to support the broader strategy of each organization. Doing so, however, can be a complex, controversial, and highly subjective matter. Determining production's relationships to marketing, engineering, and finance requires executive-level judgments on the relative emphases among these policy areas. Other judgments about internal capabilities, external factors, and production policies are also involved. Assessing these relationships is a subjective process that is often subtle and usually hidden. For managers, these judgmental areas are sources of disagreement, confusion, and controversy in policy determination.Within this context, the authors applied a judgment-capturing process, called ProPol (Production Policy), to reveal and clarify managers' judgmental processes. The procedure uses correlational methods to identify where and how managers diverge from a common policy focus. The application settings were two executive development programs—one in manufacturing and the other in the public utility industry. Grouped into teams, the executives competed in week-long computer simulation games. ProPol was introduced to assist in clarifying their production policies and strategies.In the manufacturing setting, five general policy areas—marketing effort, cost efficiency of production, R&D effort, product pricing, and service flexibility—were identified as salient variables prior to the simulation. We sought to reveal managers' subjective views on the appropriate balance among these variables. The variables were scaled and embedded within questionnaires to present alternative strategy and policy postures within the context of the simulated organizations. From analyzing the resulting judgments, ProPol served the following purposes: (1) to reveal to each manager his own decision structure; (2) to permit intermanager comparisons of decision structures among team members; (3) to provide explicit bases for focused discussions on overall strategy agreement/disagreement within teams; and (4) to serve as the basis for determining a consensus strategy by each team. The managers' judgment processes were compared in terms of judgmental consistency, complexity, and espoused versus in-useimportances of the policy variables. Consistency, the amount of uniformity in the manager's decision structure, varied widely among team members and across teams. While some executives held firm, consistent views of policy-outcome relationships, others applied their structure inconsistently or shifted from one relationship structure to another in making their judgments. Judgmental complexity also varied widely within and across teams. The judgmental structures for most managers were simple linear relationships. Several, however, used more complex quadratic and interactive structures in relating the policy areas to overall effectiveness. Even when individuals were identically complex, however, they differed as to which policy variables were significant. Furthermore, although every manager espoused that all five variables were important, they were not all significantly used. The discovery of these discrepancies had a surprise affect: managers became aware of their personal inconsistencies and were stimulated toward understanding why they occurred. The group judgments, in contrast to the individuals, were more consistent and the espoused versus empirically-derived importances were more in agreement. This occurred from group interactions following individual feedback. The feedback clarified specific areas of policy agreement, provided a productive way for resolving basic policy differences, and facilitated the groups in clarifying their strategic directions.In the utility environment, executives participated in a decision-making simulation of a consumer-owned electric utility. As before, five key policy variables for this industry were chosen. Some of the five policy variables are indirectly related to operations (e.g., rate setting and employee relations), while others are more specifically related to operations (e.g., cost efficiency, dependability, and flexibility). Analyses of the judgments revealed characteristics similar to those in the manufacturing environment. Overall, however, utility executives displayed somewhat more complex judgment structures than did manufacturing executives. As a result, there seemed to be more common ground for intrateam policy agreement. For eight of the nine teams, the group consistency exceeded the average of their members' individual consistencies. Otherwise the various teams displayed diverse functional forms for their strategy and policy judgments, and they were relatively consistent in doing so.These results indicate that ProPol can help managers clarify specific directions for the production function. By doing so, a more focused production thrust, one that is clearly and explicitly articulated, will enhance any organization's competitive strategy and provide clear guidance for subsequent decisions.     

Innovativeness and involvement as determinants of website loyalty: II. Determinants of consumer loyalty in B2C e-commerce

This paper is the second of the series of studies entitled “Innovativeness and Involvement as Determinants of Website Loyalty”, which was designed to test Foxall's [(1995). Cognitive styles of consumer initiators. Technovation 15(5), 269–288] style/involvement model in the context of Internet buyer behaviours. In this paper, a consumer Website loyalty model was proposed to describe how consumer transfer their existing brand loyalty in the traditional retail market to the same brand's Website in the B2C e-commerce market and how their perceived risk at the brand's Website mediates this loyalty transformation. Data were collected via an email invitation and Web-based questionnaire. One thousand and fourty four Taiwan Internet buyers randomly selected from the database of a well-known brand's Website have completed the survey. The multiple regression technique indicated the robustness of this loyalty transformation model (adjusted R²=0.50). Findings further indicated the impact that consumers’ cognitive style/involvement have on their loyalty transformation model. After segmenting consumers via their DSI and PDI scores, the distinct loyalty transformation models are revealed: the adjusted R² of more-involved innovators’ loyalty transformation model was the highest (0.60), followed by more involved adaptors’ model (0.45), less involved innovators’ model (0.45), and finally, less involved adaptors’ model (0.42). Discussions of how consumers’ cognitive style and involvement level interact with each other and impact on the predictors of the Website loyalty are discussed. Proposals are made of how Website managers can use this knowledge to build marketing strategies.     

Exploring the fluid boundary between ‘legitimate performance management’ and ‘downward bullying’: an experimental approach

Using an experimental design, this research examines the extent to which managers and employees perceive management behaviours differently. Eight simulated employment scenarios were presented to an aggregated sample of managers and non‐managerial employees (n = 435), and the respondents were asked to evaluate the extent to which the behaviours depicted are seen as bullying. It was found that employees are more likely than managers to perceive ‘legitimate performance management’ as bullying but also that managers are more likely than employees to perceive more overt bullying as bullying per se. This divergence in perceptions suggests that what constitutes bullying, ontologically speaking, depends on one's point of view and implies that reality is socially constructed. The research has important implications for organisations and trade unions in the development of bullying policies and procedures.     

The contractual and value relevance of reported earnings in a dividend-focused environment

This study investigates the relevance of reported earnings in the context of an institutional environment, i.e., Switzerland, in which investors focus on dividends. In conjunction with a dividend focus, the financial reporting environment faced by Swiss firms provides their managers with more accounting discretion than managers of Anglo-Saxon firms typically have. From a contractual perspective, dividendbased earnings management is expected since Swiss corporate law explicitly states that dividends, which must be voted on by stockholders, are to be based upon a firm's reported earnings. From a value perspective, thin trading conditions and a long-term investment horizon are expected to increase the importance of dividend payments and to influence the informativeness of reported earnings. Results indicate that Swiss managers do engage in dividend-based earnings management, that earnings quality signals are used by managers to voluntarily constrain their accounting choices and that the value relevance of earnings is conditional upon dividend payments.     

R&D strategy and Australian manufacturing industry: an empirical investigation of emphasis and effectivness

This research investigates the degree of emphasis placed by the Australian manufacturing industry on Research and Development (R&D) strategy as well as on other organisational strategies such as marketing, HRs (HR), technology, and operations at the functional level. The research extends further to investigate whether the emphasis on R&D strategy differs with contextual factors such as firm size, firm’s generic strategy, type of market, firm’s life cycle stage, etc. A mail survey was carried out to collect information from manufacturing firms across Australia. This was followed by an on-site interview of some of the senior managers of manufacturing firms from three Australian states: South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales.The study found that although the emphasis on R&D strategy has received a high priority in the past few years, it has not been as effective as the operations strategy and the technology strategy. The operations strategy has been accorded the highest importance in the past few years and this will continue in the future. The study also indicated that firms, which adopt a differentiation generic strategy, put more emphasis on R&D than the firms, which adopt cost leadership and focus generic strategies. The results did not indicate any evidence of a relationship between firm size and the R&D strategy although large firms are found to put more emphasis on operations and marketing strategies. Relatively higher emphasis was placed on the R&D strategy by businesses: at the growth stage; involved in the manufacture of consumer goods as opposed to industrial goods; involved in exports with a higher sales growth in export markets; and having a higher growth rate relative to their industry.     

A Confucian perspective on conflict resolution

Chinese business managers, in general, have been portrayed as valuing harmony and peace and having a tendency to avoid confrontation for fear of disturbing relationships involving mutual dependence. This is held to be a reflection of traditional Confucian cultural values.

This paper is an exploratory study which attempts to establish the relationship between the traditional, Confucian cultural values and the modes of conflict resolution preferred by Chinese business managers. The Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument was employed in this study to describe the preferred conflict resolution modes of Chinese business managers. The results show that compromising tend to be the most preferred conflict resolution mode of Chinese business managers because of the latter's predominantly humanistic, Confucian self-concept.

However, other modes, that is, collaborating, competing, avoiding and accommodating, are also being employed by Chinese business managers as a strategic and political variation of that Confucian self-concept.     

Investment and financing choices by time-inconsistent managers

This paper provides an analytically tractable continuous-time model in which a time-inconsistent manager can divert part of the firm’s cash flows as private benefits at the expense of outside shareholders. We endogenously determine the investment scale, investment threshold, optimal coupon and default threshold under managerial discretion. We demonstrate that time-inconsistent managers each have a trade-off between the timing and scale of investment.Among a number of important implications, by exploring agency costs of equity as deviations from the investment and financing policies that maximize equity value, our analysis reveals that a certain degree of time inconsistency in managerial preferences decreases the agency costs of equity. We also find that a naive manager more severely distorts the investment and financing policies than does a sophisticated manager, which leads to higher agency costs of equity. Finally, we document that the impacts of corporate governance variables, such as the managers’ property parameter and/or the level of managers’ ownership, depend on the managers’ beliefs regarding their future time-inconsistent behavior; this prediction provides novel empirical tests.     

Gender and organisational position: predicting victimisation of cyberbullying behaviour in working life

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate possible predictors of cyberbullying behaviour in working life by examining previously known predictors of face-to-face bullying as well as demographic variables such as gender and formal position in the work organisation. Multiple regression analyses were conducted on a random sample of 3371 respondents. The results show that a poor social climate at work predicted exposure to cyberbullying behaviour. The study also found differences related to gender and organisational position. While low support from managers was related to higher exposure to cyberbullying behaviours for men managers, men non-managers and women non-managers, this relation did not apply to women managers. For women managers alone, low support from colleagues was associated with exposure to cyberbullying behaviours. Further, only for women managers age had no protective effect of exposure to cyberbullying behaviour. These findings imply that men and women have different social experiences in terms of holding power in working life. As women managers are in a minority in working life, other factors may be involved in predicting exposure to cyberbullying behaviour for women managers than for the other three groups. This article contributes to the sparse knowledge on cyberbullying in working life by recognising triggering factors.     

SOME EVIDENCE FOR AN INTERNATIONAL MANAGERIAL CULTURE

An analysis is reported of the relations between the semantic responses obtained from managers of four nationalities. A total of 365 expatriate and local managers in the Singaporean subsidiaries of 34 American, British and Japanese M.N.C.s assessed their own and each of the other groups along each of 18 adjectival antonym pairs. For each nationality the correlations between the semantic items are used as similarity data for multidimensional scaling of the adjectives. It is shown that the 18 adjectival pairs can be reduced to a two-dimensional circular map for each nationality, and that the placing of the adjectives on the circle agrees with a root mean square misfit of about 10° for the four nationalities. The results support the hypothesis that, for the groups considered, a shared international culture exists in the managerial context. The two dimensions on which the 36 semantic items can be mapped are interpretable as functional/dysfunctional and open/closed.     

Tensions between assessment,grading and development in development centres: a case study

Development centres capitalize upon tried and tested assessment centre methods and are quite widely used in career management. However, a number of issues arise in their operation. Some of these reflect the balance between, on the one hand, assessing and grading people and, on the other hand, facilitating and guiding their future development. An investigation is reported of how these issues are experienced and made sense of in a UK-based international company. Data were gathered on two occasions one year apart (Ns = 95 and 113) from participants and other stakeholders in a development centre for potential senior managers. Findings indicate that participants who were awarded a high grade at the centre did not necessarily have more positive perceptions of the development centre process. However, grading, with its consequences for development, motivation and social networks, was salient in respondents' comments about the centres. Themes in these responses are identified and described. Participants were more likely than others (e.g. assessors, line managers) to value the development centre for reasons related to their development, whereas others were more likely to mention assessment/grading. Few respondents mentioned both. Overall, the findings support, to some extent, concerns about the incompatibility of grading and development, but also suggest that the use of grading does not entirely negate the developmental value of the centres. Much depends on perceptions of how the grading information is used.     

The Interpretation And Resolution Of Resource Allocation Issues In Professional Organizations: A Critical Examination Of The Professional-Manager Dichotomy*

Professional organizations have long been depicted as rife with conflict between professionals, who are assumed to represent the interests of their profession, and managers, who are assumed to represent the potentially competing interests of the organization. This study examines the validity of this assumption. Based on past research on both professional organizations and knowledge structure development, we predict that to the extent that professionals and managers conflict, they may do so because they interpret 'identical' issues differently. The results of a study of resource allocation decision preferences with 350 chief financial officers, chief medical officers, and physicians revealed strong support for our issue interpretation predictions, and virtually no support for the simple professional–manager dichotomy. Specifically, using structural equation modeling, we found that: (1) single resource allocation issues could be interpreted in multiple ways; (2) issue interpretations were strong predictors of decision preferences; (3) professionals and managers tended to interpret issues differently, although many of the differences were not consistent with past theorizing about professionals; (4) the interpretations and decision preferences of professionals who occupied management positions were like those of other professionals but different from those of managers; and (5) decision maker status (i.e., professional and/or manager) was only modestly related to decision preference. Our findings suggest that the sources and manifestations of a professional–manager dichotomy are more complex than previously reported.     

CROSS‐COUNTRY RANKINGS IN INTERGENERATIONAL MOBILITY: A COMPARISON OF APPROACHES FROM ECONOMICS AND SOCIOLOGY

Abstract This paper summarizes research on the relative level of intergenerational mobility – whether classified by income, education or social class. The literatures on education and income mobility reveal a similar ranking with South America, other developing nations, southern European countries and France tending to have rather limited mobility although the Nordic countries exhibit strong mobility. Estimates of mobility based on social class point to rather different patterns, and we demonstrate that these differences are most likely generated by intergenerational earnings persistence within social classes. The second part of the paper looks for explanations for the differences in earnings and education persistence and finds that mobility is negatively correlated with inequality and the return to education but positively correlated with a nation's education spending.     

ANALYZING CULTURAL STEREOTYPES IN MULTINATIONAL BUSINESS: UNITED STATES AND AUSTRALIA

As U.S. business becomes more international, so does U.S. management education. Executive development programmes offer courses in the U.S. and abroad to managers from many nations. As part of the transfer of U.S. management methods, the concepts, techniques and beliefs taught in these programmes may not be easily accepted, especially by foreign managers. Careful examination of cultural differences in attitudes and opinions is a necessary step in the successful transfer of management technology. This paper compares U.S. and Australian managers' values, attitudes, beliefs and opinions on a wide range of topics using a modified version of Schein's Public Opinion Questionnaire. Our findings suggest that there are common business management views as well as national differences among managers in the U.S. and Australia.