Impact of networking on career development: Experience of high-flying women academics in Malaysia

The article reports a study the objective of which is to explore the experience in networking of a group of high-flying women academics (HFWAs) and its impact on career development. Data were gathered using in-depth interviews to 31 women professors who have been identified as high-flyers. Networking had brought them to fast upward career mobility. The themes that relate to the influence of networking to their career are: (i) graduate study paved the way for international networking; (ii) networking created win-win situation for both individuals and institutional partners; and (iii) personal factors contributing to networking. Findings are significant to other academics particularly women who are aspiring to be in the fast-track career.     

How MNE subsidiaries transfer HRM practices in distant environments: A tale of two IKEA subsidiaries

While most research in the international business field focuses on the impact of the national institutional environment on multinational enterprises (MNEs), this paper explores the opposite relationship—the role and impact of MNE subsidiaries on the host country institutional environment. I analyze the subsidiaries' agency in the transfer activities of human resource management (HRM) practices by bringing the case of IKEA subsidiaries in Korea and Japan and find that these subsidiaries not only adapted to pressures arising from an institutional distance but also played an important role in influencing the institutional arrangement for employment system of their host countries. With a contextualized agency model, this study finds that institutional and organizational contexts that these subsidiaries are embedded in shaped their agencies and strategic responses and co-evolved with their host institutional environments while transferring HRM practices. These findings have implications for the IB and IHRM field, as they highlight the potential of MNE subsidiaries as agents.     

Business and Management Impact Assessment in Research Excellence Framework 2014: Analysis and Reflection

The evaluation of research impact is likely to remain an important element of research quality audits in the UK for the foreseeable future. With this paper, we contribute to debates on impact and relevance of business and management studies research through an analysis of Research Excellence Framework 2014 impact scores within the business and management unit of assessment. We offer insights into the organizational contexts of UK business schools within which impact is produced, drawing attention to the issues of linkages with research intensity, grant income generation, research team size, career stage and gender of academics, and whether impact activity is focused on private or public sector organizations and national or international reach. We put forward recommendations for managers responsible for business schools and higher education policymakers regarding management and organizational policies and processes, as well as possible changes to the rules guiding future research excellence audits.     

Institutional Shifts In Inter-Municipal Service Delivery

Comparative research on inter-municipal cooperation in eight European countries shows that there is a great variety of institutional arrangements for cooperation across the different countries. Also, these arrangements tend to change over time in terms of the scope of cooperation among partners, their composition and the degree of organizational integration. This article describes and analyzes the variety of and shifts in institutional arrangements for a specific class of inter-municipal cooperation arrangements: those that are set up to provide for the joint delivery of public services. It is argued that specific arrangements are typically the outcomes of interaction between national institutional contexts, environmental factors and local preferences.     

Engaging institutions in global careers: highly skilled self-initiated expatriates’ journeys through a Nordic welfare state

Recent years of research have highlighted the phenomenon of self-initiated expatriation and clarified the individual agency that underlies it, such as its motivational drivers, thereby depicting it as one form of boundaryless career. Yet as a consequence the role of wider institutional and structural contexts has been left under-theorized. This article provides a much needed examination of the interaction between institutional contexts and agency in self-initiated global careers. It advances the understanding of how self-initiated expatriates (SIEs) are influenced by and engage institutions in constructing their global mobility and careers. The research is a field-based study of SIEs’ encounters with the institutions of a Nordic welfare state and consists of interviews, observations, and document analyses. It makes a relevant addition to understanding how the self-directed expatriation of highly skilled professionals is institutionally moderated. It expands knowledge by showing how SIEs engage and potentially aim to influence public institutions and discourses to further their global mobility and work experiences and by providing a differentiated and distributed view of agency in self-initiated expatriation. While institutional environments condition global mobility and work experiences, they are potentially also influenced by the global talent that flows through them.     

Individual Preferences and Job Characteristics: An Analysis of Cooperative Credit Banks

The aim of this paper is to analyse individual preferences in relation to different job characteristics. More specifically, this work focuses on the case of employees of cooperative credit banks (CCBs) in Campania and accounts for certain fundamental institutional features: CCBs are designed to pursue specific member interests rather than profit maximization, and most employees are both owners and consumers. The research is conducted by applying a conjoint analysis approach with stated preference data. Novel features of the analysis include the application of this approach to empirical research on worker incentives and the use of a mixed logit model.     

Should I stay or should I go?

In 2002, the German system of higher education went through a set of reforms that were—amongothers—intended to make the university career more attractive for young academics, in order not to lose them to alternative careers. Until today, however, there is no theoretical or empirical analysis on the determinants of young academics’ career decisions. In our paper, we analyse the decisions of young academics to leave the university career system on the basis of a self-selection model. Using an original data set on junior scientists in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, we render first empirical evidence on the determinants of young academics’ careers decisions, and find that these are influenced by monetary as well as non-monetary factors.     

Forgotten travelers: Adjustment and career implications of international business travel for expatriates

In this study, we demonstrate the importance of assessing international business travel in the context of expatriation. Based on the Job Demands-Resources theory, we suggest that engaging in international business travel is beneficial for expatriates when certain conditions are in place and detrimental when they are not. We propose that expatriates who have adequate job resources will reap the benefits of international business travel and achieve better adjustment to living and working in the host country and have greater career satisfaction. Survey results based on a sample of 161 expatriates provide support that engaging in international business travel is positively and indirectly related to expatriates' career satisfaction through expatriate adjustment when job resources are abundant, and it has a negative indirect association when resources are low. We further find that job resources play a role in the relationship between international business travel and career satisfaction primarily when the host-country culture is similar to that of the home country.     

Overcoming blind spots in global sourcing research: Exploiting the cross-sections between supply chain management and international business

This article reviews existing work on global sourcing and suggests a number of new theoretical directions for research in this area. We discuss how international business (IB) and supply chain management (SCM) research can benefit from increased cross-fertilization of themes and perspectives. We begin by introducing a taxonomy of global sourcing research, building on relevant insights from SCM research. We then generate recommendations for potential future research on global sourcing, particularly highlighting antecedents, processes, performance and contextual variables. SCM research employs the entire supply chain as the primary unit of analysis (rather than the individual firm), while IB research focuses primarily on international aspects, adapting to institutional contexts in a globalized world. Building on this complementarity, several specific empirical directions are proposed for future research directions.     

Business groups' outward FDI: A managerial resources perspective

Outward FDI strategies are driven by firms' resource endowments, which in turn are conditioned by their home environment. In emerging economies, thus, the pattern of outward FDI is shaped by local firms' idiosyncratic contexts and the resources that these firms developed to fit the contexts. This includes business groups, a dominant organizational form in many emerging economies, competing with context-bound resources. When they wish to transcend their home context, they need internationally valuable resources, especially managerial resources, which may be quite different than the resources that enable domestic growth. This paper thus explores what resources drive this international growth in the case of Taiwanese business groups. Starting from Penrosian Theory, we focus on managerial resources that are shared across the member firms of a group, and thus shape the profile of the group. We find that international work experience favors internationalization while international education does not. Moreover, domestic institutional resources distract from internationalization, presumably because they are not transferable into other institutional contexts, and thus favor other types of growth.     

Exploring the Career Capital Impact of International Assignments within Distinct Organizational Contexts

The existing expatriation literature concentrates on what individuals need to perform in an international assignment (IA) but neglects what they gain from their foreign work experience. Using a dual‐dependency perspective this study presents results from 26 in‐depth interviews with international secondees within two UK‐based organizational contexts. The paper explores the perceived impact of an IA on the career capital of individuals, showing that the outcomes of IAs can be equivocal for expatriates. Each firm concentrated their human resource mechanisms on developing different types of career capital and this focused individual behaviour on diverse career capital activities. In one of the organizations there was an internal misalignment between organizational and individual assignee focus. Based on the research a number of propositions were developed. This study provided an exploratory insight into points of departure rather than complementarity in individuals' international careers in organizations, which has been at the core of much recent research and writing. A more complex, contextualized picture of the effects of IAs on the careers of individuals emerged.     

Key Issues in the Senior Female International Career Move: A Qualitative Study in a European Context

Research investigating the position of women in management has, largely, been confined within national boundaries. Over the last 15 years, empirical studies of women in international management have been undertaken, predominantly in North America. Overall, however, in this research field, many questions remain unanswered or have been only partially addressed. The particular focus of this study is on the senior female international managerial career move in Europe – a relatively unexplored area. Fifty senior female expatriate managers were interviewed, representing a wide range of industry and service sectors. The aims of the study were to develop an understanding of the senior female international career move in a European context in order to more fully understand both the covert and overt barriers that may limit women's international career opportunities. The results of the study show that the senior international career move has largely been developed along a linear male model of career progression, a development which, taken together with gender disparity both in organizations and family responsibilities, frequently prevents women employees from reaching senior managerial positions. The findings suggest that organizations which adopt a proactive approach to female expatriate managers should have a competitive advantage in the international environment.     

Do “protean” employees make better leaders? The answer is in the eye of the beholder

While the protean career (Hall, 1976, 2002) has been lauded for its advantages in helping individuals adapt to changing career contexts, it is not clear how this career orientation may impact how others perceive a person's leadership ability. In this study, we hypothesized that those with a protean career orientation would receive higher leadership ratings from subordinates and superiors, but lower leadership ratings from peers, in part based upon social comparison theory. Using structural equation modeling, our hypotheses regarding subordinates and peers were supported, but not with respect to superiors, who, along with peers, rated those with a protean career orientation lower in terms of transformational leadership as measured by the MLQ. We discuss potential reasons for these findings and the consequences for research and theory. Also, we examine the implications of this research for leadership development, workforce recruitment and retention, and possible generational significance.     

Unravelling Learning within Multinational Corporations*

This article explores the impact of institutional variation on the extent to which subsidiary firms learn from multinational corporations. Learning is conceptualized here as consisting of two aspects: knowledge flow and reinforcement of or change in routines to incorporate the behaviourist assumptions of learning into the international business field. The research is based on in‐depth case studies that systematically compare the ways in which parent company knowledge diffuses to Polish, Turkish, Italian and German subsidiary firms in the chemical industry. The findings show that even though firms face the same global pressure to integrate and pursue the same international strategy, their learning outcomes are not the same. There is heterogeneous learning as a result of differences in the institutional context of home countries. Where institutional structures are not favourable to learning, the proactive or reactive orientation of actors to identifying future needs and modifying existing schemata – which highlight the importance of human agency – is significant in explaining learning.     

Internationalization of Emerging Economy SMEs: A Tripod Approach

Research suggests that internationalizing SMEs in the West enjoy far greater institutional support. There is, however, little understanding of the internationalization processes of emerging economies' SMEs (EESMEs) and yet they are notable contenders in international trade. Accordingly, this research draws from an integrated strategy tripod framework to develop new perspectives accounting for how Iranian-based EESMEs internationalize and compete in international markets. A comprehensive analysis of Iranian EESMEs' survey data revealed that, other than their owner's managerial perceptions of their industry, firm, and institutional constraints, international market knowledge (IMK) significantly moderated their internationalization strategies. Such understanding advances research on firm internationalization by pinpointing the central role of IMK in forming internationalization strategies by EESMEs in hard-to-reach contexts, which has implications for academic research and policy-making, leading to needed reform based on theory and practice.     

Understanding top managers’ careers: How does career variety impact tenure on the board?

Career variety has recently received attention in management literature in general, and top management literature in particular. While existing publications have predominantly linked career variety to individual adaptability, agility or competences, this paper focuses on the relationship between top managers’ career variety and their tenure on the board. We rely on the boundaryless career approach and argue that there is a negative relationship between career variety and board tenure. Drawing on a sample of executive directors in UK FT 100 firms, we provide empirical evidence that increased career variety leads to shorter tenure on the board. We also reveal that this relationship is further strengthened with international educational experience. In addition, we show that in-house work experience mitigates the negative association between career variety and board tenure. We contribute to the literature on top managers’ careers by unravelling the consequences that career variety during early and mid-stages of a career has on tenure on the board – and hence on career stability in later stages of a career.     

Only Time Can Tell: Whether and When the Improvement in Career Development Opportunities Alleviates Knowledge Workers’ Emotional Exhaustion in the Chinese Context

Through extending the resource perspective, drawing on the temporal comparison theory, this study examines career development opportunities (CDOs), focusing on knowledge workers and considering the relative changes in CDOs before and after their job change in the Chinese context. Findings from a survey of 379 Chinese knowledge workers who have transferred their jobs at least once reveal that the improvement of CDOs can have a double‐edged‐sword effect on knowledge workers’ well‐being, shown as emotional exhaustion in this study. Although the improvement of CDOs negatively predicts knowledge workers’ emotional exhaustion in general, findings of a three‐way interaction reveal that offering more high‐quality CDOs can aggravate emotional exhaustion when knowledge workers have been working in their present position for a relatively long period, but have not received a pay rise. This study makes a theoretical contribution by introducing boundary conditions and testing their interactive influence. It helps broaden understanding of how CDOs can affect knowledge workers’ emotional exhaustion. It also has implications for enhancing the well‐being of knowledge workers, particularly in national and organizational contexts where there are significant skill shortages and retention problems.     

Exploring the effects of workplace support on work-life experience: a study of Malaysia

To date most studies of workplace support and work-life experience have been of contexts where government policies and legislation to protect employee work-life balance interests are well established, such as US, UK, and other European countries. Little scrutiny has been given to these issues in less developed economies, where support and protection in terms of work-life policies and legislation at the national level is rather limited. Malaysia, the setting of this study, provides such a context. Two types of organizational support, work flexibility and superior support, are studied for their impact on work-life experience of Malaysians. The findings of this study are based on a national survey of working adults in Malaysia. Work-life experience is conceptualized to capture conflict and enrichment aspects, as well as bidirectional effects between work and nonwork. Results show that work flexibility and superior support lower work-life conflict marginally but facilitate greater work-life enrichment among Malaysians. The paper also draws out implications of these findings for human resource development professionals operating in workplace settings within national contexts with limited mandatory work-life provisions.     

The Europeanization of National Planning: Explaining the Causes and the Potentials of Change

Abstract

This article proposes a methodological framework for analyzing the Europeanization of national planning, that is, EU influence on domestic planning systems and policies. It seeks in particular to examine whether, where, and how Europeanization of national planning occurs and under which analytic frameworks it may be explained. To this end, the article proposes a three-step research approach. First, it highlights the main patterns of Europeanization in the area of national planning in relation to different modes of EU governance and ideal types of Europeanization. Second, it suggests a typology for the examination of the potential effects of the Europeanization of planning at the domestic level. Finally, it develops some hypotheses on how different institutional, socio-economic and cultural contexts may accommodate or restrain the Europeanization of national planning.     

Physician leadership. How do physician executives view themselves?

Most physician executives today have acquired substantial management training and experience, and many have worked with and relied on the expertise of mentors for their career guidance and development. Physician executives are actually becoming executives who happen to be physicians. They view themselves first as leaders, then as physicians, and finally as managers. That is a remarkable transformation in perception. To chronicle this process, Witt/Kieffer, Ford, Hadelman & Lloyd conducted a national survey this spring among senior physician executives in both payer and provider organizations. The data provide a "snapshot" of their role, and may also suggest some future scenarios for the industry. The primary reasons for choosing to pursue a management role noted by most participants include a desire to be part of the health care solution and an interest in management and leadership challenges.