International Journal of Cross Cultural Management

A model extending international research by defining relationships among Nicholson’s modes of adjustment, Black’s degree of expatriate adjustment, and expatriate task and contextual performance was developed and tested using a sample of 153 expatriate managers and 364 host country subordinates from nine multinational hotel companies. Structural equations modeling results provided overall support for the proposed model and all but one of the paths in the model. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.

The ways team members choose to influence each other and the political processes that take place within the team have important implications for the team’s effectiveness. We present an exploratory investigation of the ways both phenomena occur in global virtual teams. Based on interviews with team members and managers, combined with existing knowledge of these processes, we present a preliminary model that includes familiarity, team centrality and task focus as variables mediating the relationship between the multicultural and virtual aspects of the teams and the use of influence and politics. Our findings also suggest that the use of hard influence tactics and political actions is milder in global virtual teams in relation to collocated teams.

This study aims to explore communication strategies for relationship building across cultures from a linguistic as well as a culture-specific perspective. Specifically, it sees business relationships as part of social capital and compares communication strategies used to build relationships in sales firms. The research method is based on a discourse analysis of interviews with business managers, which also incorporates their success stories. In the analysis, relationship building is divided into two stages: the initiating stage and the maintaining stage. It has been found that more interpersonal strategies have been employed by Chinese and Indian business managers when initiating a business relationship. In contrast, the New Zealand and South African managers tend to use more impersonal communication strategies to promote public relations. Similar interpersonal communication strategies are employed in all the target cultures for maintaining relationships. However, a stronger orientation for long-term relationships in the Chinese and Indian cultures has been identified. Furthermore, the communication strategies are dynamic in all the countries investigated since they are becoming more and more multicultural and increasingly globalized in international business and management.

This study examines an often-ignored area, namely the relationship between organizational information and organizational commitment, using a sample of employees from Trinidad and Tobago. Basing our arguments on research in Anglo cultures, we postulated that organization information would be positively related to organizational commitment and the latter mediates the relationship between organization information and job satisfaction. Furthermore, we also predicted that job satisfaction would mediate the relationship between organizational commitment and turnover intentions. Finally, it was hypothesized that job alternatives will moderate the relationship between job satisfaction and intention to quit. The hypothesized relationships yielded mostly significant results. The latter is not surprising given that Trinidad and Tobago’s cultural context is fairly similar to Anglo cultures. We discuss both theoretical and practical implications of our findings in the context of cross cultural management.

This article is a reflection on conceptual foundations of cultural management research. By relying on extant literature, a few conceptual underpinnings are examined and criticized, and some suggestions for improvement are proposed. Discussing such issues can be useful not only for advancing future research but also for achieving a more profound understanding of previous studies and their limitations.