Building cultural intelligence: insights from project management job advertisements

This paper examines how organisations that conduct worldwide recruitment of project management professionals can derive insight from the cultural preferences stated within project management job advertisements. Drawing on project management practitioner job advertisements placed by 2040 organisations across seven countries and seven industries, we employ Hofstede’s national cultural framework to categorise cultural preferences which the organisations persistently replicate in their specifications of desired candidate project management practitioner competency. To map global trends and national variations, data analysis is undertaking and utilising exploratory data analysis, Poisson regression and negative binomial regression are used. The paper finds that specific national cultural dimensions – ‘Collectivism’, ‘Uncertainty Avoidance’ and, to a lesser extent, ‘Power Distance’ – are the most salient cultural denominators for advertised project management positions, while this is not the case with ‘Masculinity’ and ‘Individualism’. The findings raise issues about which organisations should seek to become more culturally intelligent, and which relate to the adaptiveness of the cultural preferences that they articulate through their job advertisements, both to project tasks and to cultural contexts for projects.     

Globalization and cultural change in international business research

The four articles in this special issue invite the reader to reflect on the impact of global business on values, ideas, and ethics around the world. In this comment, I advance four arguments that question assumptions regarding the impact of global business on culture. First, national cultures are not homogeneous and the impact of globalization on heterogeneous cultures is not easily predicted. Second, culture is not the same as cultural practice. The spread of practice does not equate with the spread of culture. Third, globalization does not represent a rupture with the past but is a continuation of prior trends. Fourth, globalization is only one of many processes involved in cultural change. By questioning these assumptions, we can build on the work of the authors of this special issue in order to develop a more accurate understanding of cultural change around the world.     

Pluralist perspectives and diverse responses: Exploring multiplexed framing in incumbent responses to digital disruption

Research applying a socio-cognitive lens to disruptive digital innovation often fails to account for intra-firm heterogeneity in how an established incumbent frames and responds to disruptive innovation. To explore the heterogeneous framing processes involved within a firm, we conducted an in-depth case study of the response of a multinational insurance group to a digitally-led disruptive innovation: the rise of internet-based general insurance aggregator platforms between 2002 and 2007. We map different response frames across three separate framing dimensions: the Challenge Type, Response Urgency and Firm Heritage, and explore their interplay in shaping responses to disruption. We introduce the idea of multiplexed framing – comprised of multiple, non-binary frames – and propose that these are holographically distributed – such that conflicting frames can be held by members of the same organizational department or group. This allows managers to leverage the ambiguity generated by multiplexed frames to select the same response strategies for different reasons leading to an equifinal resolution of conflict. We show how such framing enables the organization to trial and adaptively iterate between different strategic responses to disruptive innovation, particularly amid high uncertainty and ambiguity.     

The ebb and flow of identity: How sustainable entrepreneurs deal with their hybridity

The identity of sustainable entrepreneurs progresses and is primed by certain identity dimensions, including society, community, or competition as their frames of references, their social motivation, and their self-evaluation. Because sustainable entrepreneurs aim to achieve the goals of generating profit and create social and/or ecological value at the same time, they experience two types of tensions: one that concerns social and ecological and the other with an extension of economic aspects. To leverage these, we find identity shifts dependent on the tension sustainable entrepreneurs’ experience, activating a certain combination of identity dimension. Building on 29 case studies with European sustainable entrepreneurs, the study investigates the dynamic role of entrepreneurial identity, thereby informing about fluid hybrid identity conflict management strategies. This adds to theory on entrepreneurial identity that has widely found multiple, yet coherent entrepreneurial identities and conflict management strategies.     

The impact of social class on top managers’ attitudes towards employee downsizing

In this paper, we examine the impact of top managers' social class on their attitude towards employee downsizing. Mobilizing Bourdieu's concepts of social class as a unique social position defined by the combination of economic, cultural, and social capital, we develop hypotheses about the effects of different capital endowments, which we test with unique data on more than 2500 top managers in Germany. We find that both higher economic and higher social capital increase openness towards employee dismissals, while higher cultural capital reduces it. We also find that the overall effect of a top manager's social position is an aggregate of the effects of the individual types of capital: Managers with high cultural, low social and low economic capital are least open to employee dismissals, while those with low cultural, high social and high economic capital are most open – with the other combinations lying somewhere between the two extremes.     

Reflexivity: The role of embedded social position and entrepreneurial social skill in processes of field level change

We examine the micro-foundations of field-level organizational change by analyzing the role of social skill and social position in individuals. Our core argument is that differences in an individual's social skill and in their social position produce different degrees of reflexivity or awareness of existing social arrangements. We demonstrate how the interaction of social skill and social position produce distinct types or categories of reflexivity, each of which contributes to institutional stability or change.     

The negative can be positive for cultural competence

The trend of globalization has provoked a wide discussion with regard to cultural competence. In studies regarding cultural competence, researchers have often focused on the positive aspect in order to acquire insights and implications for other practitioners. However, intercultural dynamics involve multiple individuals with diverse backgrounds, for whom these positive aspects convey only a part of their cultural competence. Whereas, in the literature, individuals' negative feelings are often treated as problems that need to be solved and cured, the purpose of this article is to elaborate on the need to include individuals' reactions and emotional feelings in research regarding cultural competence.     

Religious Social Identities in the Hybrid Self‐presentations of Sikh Businesspeople

This paper explores the identity work practices of Thai Sikh businesspeople. The paper focuses on two important social identities in participants’ self‐presentations – those derived from religious (Sikh) and western business discourses – and identifies powerful tensions in their hybrid identity work. Conducting discourse analysis on identity work practices within interview settings, the authors explore how participants resolve, accommodate or reject these discursive tensions while attempting stable and coherent hybrid self‐presentations. They identify several different forms of hybridity, including what they term ‘equipollence’, which occurs when two equally powerful, contradictory discourses are incorporated in self‐presentations, producing potentially irresolvable intersections and leading to a lack of coherence. Contributions are made to the literatures on religion and work, hybrid identity work processes and social identities.     

My network,my self: A social network approach to work-based identity

As the organizational landscape becomes increasingly turbulent and the gig economy grows, the conventional anchors for a work-based sense of identity – a relatively stable organization, workgroup, and occupation – are losing relevance. We argue that a “network identity,” defined as the core, distinctive, and more or less enduring character of a set of social ties (e.g., “we are high-achievers”), helps fill this growing void because individuals’ networks often reflect agency and have more or less fluid boundaries and portability. These attributes enable individuals to develop or join networks that may transcend specific contexts and adapt to change. An individual’s network identity simultaneously implicates all three levels of self – individual, relational, and collective – such that it is a potentially very powerful means for realizing his or her identity motives. Crossing the dimensions of network boundary strength and network density, we offer a 2 × 2 typology of networks and discuss their implications for members’ network identities and what kinds of individuals might prefer each network.     

An Existential Approach to Risk Perception

Existential, or existential-phenomenological philosophical approaches to the social psychology of risk perception provide a novel framework for understanding issues that are common to all humanity, such as fear of death, freedom and responsibility, isolation and meaninglessness, as these anxieties are a function of existing, or being-in-the-world. These fundamental anxieties can be related theoretically to the ways people perceive risks within social and cultural milieus, and can also be used practically within case studies, as demonstrated in the three examples presented, which examine perceptions of climate change, food-related risks, and environmental awareness via a mixture of quantitative and qualitative techniques. The discussion focuses on the possible insights that can be gained from taking an existential perspective on risk perception, and relates notions of contemporary technologically-oriented societies to the existential challenges faced by individuals and societies in the contemporary world.     

The changing professional organization: A review of competing archetypes

The aim of this paper is to summarize literature relevant to the professional organization and to present a contemporary analysis of the archetype concept in this field. In order to understand recent and ongoing changes in professional organizations, the paper begins with a review of how the professional archetype evolved from the 1960s to 1990. Then, with examples from contemporary accounting, health care and law organizations, it considers the processes by which an institutionalized archetype can change. Forces for change – such as deregulation, competition, technology and globalization – can challenge the interpretive scheme and eventually delegitimize the existing archetype. At the same time, significant environmental changes can override isomorphic pressures and de‐institutionalize the long‐accepted structures. Thus we herald the emergence a new professional archetype – or perhaps several competing archetypes. Finally, the paper reviews the evolving field of professional organization as a whole, and understands the extant archetypes. A typology of professional organizations is proposed that currently seems to have three clusters of organizations – possibly three competing archetypes – namely, the traditional professional partnership, the specialized ‘Star’ form and the corporate global professional network, or GPN.     

Storymining: eliciting stories and mining their content for cultural levers

This article describes storymining, a process that involves gathering stories and mining their content to ‘bring to the surface’ a deeper understanding of the adaptive and cultural aspects of the system. These aspects, or cultural levers, can then be used to inform action. The article aligns storymining with qualitative research and differentiates it from other storytelling interventions. The article also includes a case study of a storymining experience in a healthcare organization. The author suggests that HRD practitioners can use this approach in a variety of ways, including moving individuals, organizations and/or communities towards action and navigating complexity.     

Craft,magic and the re-enchantment of the world

This essay challenges the prevailing view of progressive rationality and disenchantment as set out in Max Weber's social theory and reproduced in organizational neo-institutionalism. We observe that rationality and disenchantment cannot exist in the absence of magic, mystery and enchantment. We argue that the contemporary celebration of rationality and disenchantment is a modernist discourse that has marginalized equally compelling instances of re-enchantment. Drawing from the popular press and management research we identify five themes of re-enchantment in the world; the rise of populism, the return of tribalism, the resurgence of religion, the re-enchantment of science and the return to craft. We use these phenomena to elaborate four alternative constructs – authenticity, reflexivity, mimesis and incantation - that counterbalance the over rationalized and paralyzing concepts in neo-institutionalism – legitimacy, embeddedness, isomorphism and diffusion.     

Past,Present and Future Research on Multiple Identities: Toward an Intrapersonal Network Approach

Abstract

Psychologists, sociologists, and philosophers have long recognized that people have multiple identities—based on attributes such as organizational membership, profession, gender, ethnicity, religion, nationality, and family role(s)—and that these multiple identities shape people's actions in organizations. The current organizational literature on multiple identities, however, is sparse and scattered and has yet to fully capture this foundational idea. I review and organize the literature on multiple identities into five different theoretical perspectives: social psychological; microsociological; psychodynamic and developmental; critical; and intersectional. I then propose a way to take research on multiple identities forward using an intrapersonal identity network approach. Moving to an identity network approach offers two advantages: first, it enables scholars to consider more than two identities simultaneously, and second, it helps scholars examine relationships among identities in greater detail. This is important because preliminary evidence suggests that multiple identities shape important outcomes in organizations, such as individual stress and well-being, intergroup conflict, performance, and change. By providing a way to investigate patterns of relationships among multiple identities, the identity network approach can help scholars deepen their understanding of the consequences of multiple identities in organizations and spark novel research questions in the organizational literature.     

Knowledge transfer of the Western concept of quality

This paper addresses one of the issues in contemporary globalization theory: the extent to which there is 'one best way' in which business can be conducted and organizations managed. It uses Czarniawska's 'travels of ideas' model as an organizing framework to present and understand how the concept of 'quality', so important in contemporary approaches to manufacturing and services, and their management, travelled to, and impinged on, a newly opened vehicle assembly plant in Poland. The extent to which new meanings were mutually created in the process of translation is discussed, using ethnographic reporting and analysis techniques commonly used in diffusion research. Parallels between the process of translation as an idea becomes embedded into a new cultural location and the processes which contemporary research has identified as important to organizational learning are briefly discussed in conclusion.     

A review of the Chinese cultural influences on Chinese enterprise management

In order to create and sustain competitive advantage, a company should not only develop technologies to create products and processes that meet customer needs, but also stimulate a corporate culture that commits to continuous performance improvement. Managing corporate culture is one of a number of important factors that make for organizational change and business success. This paper reviews the cultural roots and identifies the characteristics of Chinese cultural values and management. A comparative analysis of the differences between Anglo-American and Chinese cultures is made. The cultural influences on Chinese management systems are then elaborated with reference to enterprise management in Mainland China and Hong Kong. With unique cultural heritage, collective orientation has a pervasive influence on the mode of Chinese management and organization. The prevailing Chinese culture values stress largely the paternalistic approach to management, acceptance of hierarchy and the importance of relationships. Today's Chinese enterprises need to determine changes in practice or value or both aspects of corporate culture in order to facilitate organizational change and maintain a competitive edge over their rivals. The paper also discusses the links of cultural values to employee involvement (EI) and total quality management (TQM), and initiates a need to manage cultural influences on EI/TQM practices to improve organizational performance in Chinese enterprises.     

Network memory,cultural distance and the ebb and flow of international resources – Evidence from 20 years of professional player transfers to big-five European soccer leagues

Human capital flow embeds firms into knowledge sharing–protection tension. In this study we explore whether firms balance this tension by regulating the volume of human capital inflow. Accordingly, we examine the presence of ebb and flow cycle in human capital inflow. Ebb is expressed in terms of net negative change in volume of human capital inflow of a firm, at any given period, with respect to prior period. Flow is expressed in terms of net positive change. As human capital flow embeds firms into interorganizational network, we examine moderating effects of network closure and network status on the ebb and flow. Further, we examine the role of cultural distance on the moderating effect of network closure and status on ebb and flow. We test our hypotheses based on professional football player transfers among the clubs of the Big-five European Leagues. The results indicate presence of ebb and flow in human capital inflow. Also there is moderating effect of network closure and status, such that they diminish the ebb and flow cycle. We also found evidence that cultural distance further determines effectiveness of network closure and status in diminishing ebb and flow.     

Institutional work through empathic engagement

A growing body of literature examines how actors engage with institutions and how they prompt institutional change and evolution. This article takes stock of this knowledge and contributes an affective dimension to the study of how institutional entrepreneurs achieve momentum and field-level impact. The article views institutional work as relational agency and conceptualises empathic engagement as a way for institutional entrepreneurs to relate affectively to other actors and induce cooperation. We demonstrate how empathic engagement by institutional entrepreneurs can nurture communities of practice that co-create change in institutional fields. Our argument hinges on the actors’ affective investment and advances the less developed non-cognitive dimension of institutional work. By integrating empathic engagement into institutional entrepreneurship, we demonstrate how institutional entrepreneurs nurture their ability to engage and cooperate with others to diffuse particular values through institutional work. This integration focuses on the way of knowing generated through empathic engagement: the ability to bring about a consensus by creating frames of reference and identities that others are enchanted by and subscribe to, as opposed to using coercive mechanisms.