There is a great need for business education to promote an understanding of how organizations as complex systems, composed of sets of interdependent activities, perform in dynamic or turbulent ...environments. However, there is a lack of appropriate tools with which to teach such dynamic and complex interdependencies by addressing the main challenges simultaneously-enhancing analytical, systems, and design thinking as well as avoiding cognitive overload. To address these challenges, we develop a framework that integrates the concept of activity-system maps and the NK model. We use two companies-IKEA and MUJI-to demonstrate the utility of the framework and illustrate the effects of environmental change on organizational performance and the patterns of resilience in organizations. Our integrative framework and demonstration offer visible experiment-based insights for teaching about complex organizations in business education. Correspondence concerning this article should be directed to Jiunyan Wu (jiunyan.wu@siemens.com).
Within a short time, China, Japan, and Korea have produced worldwide leading multinational enterprises (MNEs). As they expand globally, these companies face major challenges in global talent ...management (GTM). This article provides a comparative analysis of the major GTM challenges MNEs from these countries experience and the underlying reasons thereof. Our comparative overview reveals similarities in ethnocentric staffing, traditional headquarters-driven organizational cultures, and home-country language policies. While there are striking differences in performance appraisal, reward and compensation, and promotion and career advancement, these GTM practices of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean MNEs are converging to Western style global best practices, though at different levels. Building on and enriching the convergence debate and the distance literature, we identify organizational and country characteristics that help better understand the reasons for these similarities and differences.
•Comparative analysis of global talent management (GTM) of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean multinational enterprises•Similarities in ethnocentric staffing, traditional HQ-driven organizational cultures, and home-country language policies•Striking differences in terms of HR practices•Conceptual framework explaining similarities and differences in GTM practices provided•Directions for future research in GTM in general, and for Asian MNEs specifically provided
The need for a better understanding of radical uncertainty might have never been greater. Ill-preparedness for natural hazards, a resurgence of serious public health concerns or illusions of control ...over unruly technology question the extent to which we can 'really' shape the world around us. Human-made crises, too, test how we routinely do things. We ask how organisations and actors within them prepare for a collapse of meaning and practise radical uncertainty. Given the breadth and depth of the region's energy (and, as some would argue, turbulences), Asia provides a fitting context for exploring accommodation to and learning from low-probability, high-impact incidents. By reviewing the business and management research on shocks in Asia, we find that there is a strong human side to dealing with the unknown. We argue that what organisations and actors within them do prior, during and after a shock event is substantially contingent upon cultural environments. To elaborate, we discuss the role of the uncertainty avoidance dimension of national culture in dealing with shock events. We further combine this dimension with the universalism-particularism dimension to discuss future research directions. Our exploration of resultant differences in preparedness, resourcefulness and learning offers a more rounded inquiry into how Asian business actors deal with shocks.
Due to the high costs and strategic importance of expatriate assignments, expatriate performance management (EPM) plays an increasingly important role for multinational enterprises (MNEs). However, ...research on EPM is still in its infancy. Drawing from the convergence/divergence debate in international human resource management, this study investigates and compares EPM strategies and practices across MNEs from three different country clusters to better understand whether EPM practices tend to converge, diverge, or crossverge (i.e., show aspects of both). Results from surveying 132 Anglo‐Saxon, Germanic, and Japanese MNEs reveal prominent differences (divergence) at the EPM strategic level such that Japanese MNEs tend to pursue more ethnocentric staffing strategies and design EPM systems specifically tailored to expatriates. On the practice level, we found both commonalities and differences between Japanese and Anglo‐Saxon and Germanic MNEs, pointing toward crossvergence. Theoretical and practical implications of our results are discussed.
Researchers have repeatedly found that the use of mobile technology (MT) in the West is a double-edged sword that produces both positive and negative psychological experiences for employees. MT blurs ...the boundaries between work and non-work contexts, limiting employees' personal space and time as a result, and possibly having a negative impact on their work engagement. Our findings in Japan, however, were different. Japanese workers' total MT usage (i.e., during office and non-office hours) had a positive impact on their work autonomy, which, in turn, led to greater work engagement. Emotional exhaustion was not related to MT usage. The findings from this study imply that MT can result in positive psychological experiences for employees and present some managerial implications for boundary conditions.
In this paper, we apply uncertainty management theory (UMT) to hypothesize that host country national (HCN) employees in foreign subsidiaries use the information of expatriates' procedural and ...distributive justice in their performance evaluations to reduce uncertainty about whether they trust these expatriates, which subsequently influence HCNs' job satisfaction and turnover intention. We also integrate UMT with research on language in MNCs to hypothesize that the level of HCN's English proficiency creates the context in which the aforementioned relationships are stronger when HCNs' English proficiency is high. Data collected from 501 HCNs in foreign subsidiaries in Japan provided support for these hypotheses. This study contributes to research on international management by focusing on HCNs' fairness perceptions, uncertainty, and English language proficiency in performance evaluations conducted by expatriates in foreign subsidiaries.
To examine how supervisors respond to employee voice in the Asian context, we conducted a scenario-based experiment in China and Japan and investigated the effects of the target of voice (immediate ...supervisors or skip-level leaders), voicing employees’ expertise, and supervisors’ sense of power on supervisors’ responses. Data from both samples showed that voicing employees’ target of voice and expertise have significant effects on the overall evaluations rated by supervisors, partially mediated by liking or perceived threat. Moreover, data from the Chinese sample showed that supervisors’ sense of power moderates the effect of voicing employees’ expertise on supervisors’ responses.
There has been an increasing interest to explore and gain knowledge about customer engagement behavior among academia and practitioners. Particularly, the value co-creation process in customer ...services is essential to explore the interaction structure. In this study, we applied the computational simulation of the NK model to identify the value co-creation process between service employees and customers in the service context. To specifically explore the dynamic interaction among them, we identified what kind of service is provided for what type of customers and when service performance improves according to the degree of interaction between service employees and customers. The simulations show that the greatest service value can be achieved when employees and customers jointly perform local search (90%) and long jump (10%). However, if both employees and customers jointly perform local search only, the service value can be stuck in a local optimum. In cases where employees and customers make their independent improvement, either through local search or long jump, the overall service value varies depending on the complexity of interactions between employees and customers. For example, the improvement in service value is the worst when employees and customers make long jumps at independent timings in high complex interactions. Our computational simulations offer visible experimental-based insights into understanding the value co-creation process with customers and promising results for customer service studies.
A part of diversity management is working to achieve gender equality and create a comfortable working environment for women. However, in many organizations, gender biases and stereotypes frequently ...occur, consciously or unconsciously, regardless of whether women take on leadership roles. In addition, women must overcome a variety of challenges when taking on leadership roles or aspiring to become leaders. Based on the above background, we review and integrate the literature on management and career studies related to the challenges that women face in the process of advancing to leadership positions in organizations. Specifically, we examine the external and internal factors that create the various obstacles that women who aspire to leadership positions in structured organizations face from a gender perspective. Based on the integrative review, we discuss the implications for practices to increase the number of female leaders.
Although job seekers often rely on indirect or inaccurate information to assess the attractiveness of potential employers, internship experience provides more realistic and accurate information, ...which may influence organizational attractiveness. Through the ex-ante and ex-post (i.e., pre-internship and post-internship) research design with a sample of Japanese undergraduate students in a university-sponsored internship program, we found that, although organizational attractiveness on average declined after the internship, skill variety and feedback from employees in the internship job were positively related to perceived needs-supplies (NS) fit beyond the effect of its pre-internship level. The NS fit, in turn, was related to organizational attractiveness beyond the effect of its pre-internship level. Moreover, some of the above mediating effects were stronger for interns with high social skill and/or high self-esteem. Our findings highlight the importance of the effect of internships on college students’ school-to-work transition.
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