Mind the context gap: a critical review of engagement within the public sector and an agenda for future research

Abstract

In this review paper, we critically examine the evidence base relating to engagement within the public sector given a wide range of public services have faced acute human resource challenges over recent years. Our review of 188 empirical studies reveals that much of the evidence focuses attention on individual and job level factors, such that specific public sector contextual contingencies have rarely been considered. Through identifying significant ‘context gaps’, we present a future research agenda addressing the following key areas: i) clarifying the relationship between engagement and public service motivation, ii) further contextualizing general engagement models, iii) exploring cultural, socio-political, and institutional factors in more depth, iv) encouraging a more critical perspective on engagement, v) understanding the variation in the experience of engagement across different public services/delivery models, and vi) connecting more strongly with practical concerns and initiatives within public organizations. In presenting this agenda, we highlight how engagement and HRM scholars can more strongly embed their research within a sectoral context.     

Contributing to Global Management Knowledge: A Case for High Quality Indigenous Research

The major contributor to global management knowledge is scholarship in developed economies, especially in North America and Western Europe. The development of a global management knowledge base lags behind the globalization of business enterprises. With the emergence of many developing economies around the world, progress in building the body of global management knowledge could be enhanced by encouraging high quality indigenous research in these novel contexts. This essay is a complementary piece to the APJM Special Issue on Asian Management Research: Frontiers and Challenges (August 2002). It discusses three types of global management models through two types of context-sensitive research. It argues the need for high quality indigenous research, using the influential studies on management in the Chinese context as illustrations. It offers guidelines on conducting high quality indigenous research that produces contextualized knowledge on the one hand and contributes to global knowledge on the other.     

Approaching Korean Business and Management Ideals through the Lens of Yongo: A Scholar–Practitioner Perspective

By adopting the insider perspective based on participant observations, this article explores a new dimension of management ideals in South Korea. In particular, it proposes an important cultural context extension to the conventional collectivism paradigm that is often used to explain Korean management. By introducing the term yongo, which denotes exclusive and informal social networks based on (pseudo-) family, university alumni, and regional connections, challenges for management practices can be reported, including, for example, the difficulties that foreign managers face in accessing these networks to establish high-trust ties and influence business decisions.     

The phenomenon of young talent management in Russia—A context‐embedded analysis

This article describes the particularities of young talent management (TM) in Russia and explains them through a context‐specific analysis. It adopts a multilevel perspective that acknowledges the relevance of context at three levels: the macro environment, the organizational, and the individual. Data were gathered through 46 interviews with HR managers and young talents from six Russian companies and six Russian subsidiaries of foreign multinational companies (MNCs) active in a variety of industries. Following the contextualization approach, this study offers important insights into the interplay between macro, organizational, and individual factors as well as their isolated or interrelated effects on TM. While multilevel contextualization provides the rationale behind certain TM practices and the particular focus on young talents in Russia, it also explains why Russian companies are inspired by global best TM practices. Thus, contextualization allows for explaining the coexistence of a specific environment and nonspecific (global best) TM practices. Important particularities are revealed also when compared to the results of TM studies in other emerging countries. The article contributes not only to the TM discussion, but also to the wider field of international human resource management and the international management literature regarding contextualization.     

A contextual theory of organizational learning from failures and successes: A study of acquisition completion in the global newspaper industry, 1981–2008

This study develops and tests theory about the context‐specificity and outcome‐dependence of experiential learning in acquisition processes. First, we investigate whether learning from experience gained in different acquisition contexts is limited to influencing subsequent outcomes of same‐context transactions. Second, we analyze whether learning patterns in response to prior successes and failures differ across acquisition contexts, depending on two properties of these contexts—the degree of structural variance and the level of stimulation of deliberate learning. Learning is assessed with respect to an underexplored organizational goal variable in acquisitions: completion of a publicly announced transaction. An analysis of 4,973 acquisition attempts in the newspaper industry in 1981–2008 largely supports our theory. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.