Managing the new global workforce:: Fostering diversity, forging consistency

As a result of rapid foreign investment, many multinational firms now have workforces that are spread across continents and countries, and that include an increasingly complex blend of cultures and nationalities. Their challenge is to capture the benefits of a diverse workforce while also forging necessary consistency around the world. This article explores the concepts of diversity and consistency as they apply to multinational firms, and draws on examples from several leading multinationals to suggest how firms can better manage their global workforces.     

Normative evaluation of tax policies: from households to individuals

We simulate a hypothetical family tax credit on a sample of French couples, using jointly a collective model of labor supply and a tax-benefit calculator. Work behaviors represent here a general concept of “effort,” and hence, individual productivities cannot be assimilated with wage rates. They are retrieved by inversion of the optimal household program under simple assumptions on household preferences and bargaining rules. The calibrated model is used to predict incentive effects of the reform and distributive impacts on individuals and households. The desirability of the reform depends on which of these two welfare units is used for normative evaluation.      

Learning About the Market’s Periphery: IBM’s WebFountain

The web can provide valuable information to an organisation on upcoming trends, competitors’ movements and customers’ gripes. More important, the information is within reach of every organisation. The problem is that there is so much of it. This paper describes how IBM set up and utilised WebFountain—a tool to help it extract trends and detect patterns from the vast amounts of raw data available. Still, the authors argue, any organisation needs to do more to use to its full potential such a system for extracting analytic solutions from the web: the most important being to ask the right questions in the first place.     

The Role of Trust and Contractual Safeguards on Cooperation in Non-equity Alliances

Because partners may behave opportunistically in alliances, contractual safeguards or trust between partners are necessary for successful outcomes. However, it remains controversial whether safeguards and trust substitute or complement each other. Drawing on transaction cost theory, this study conceptualizes both contractual safeguards and trust as important control mechanisms in non-equity alliances, and develops a model that relates contractual safeguards and trust to cooperative outcomes. We test our hypotheses with data collected from 233 architect-contractor partnerships in Hong Kong. The results show that the relationship between contractual safeguards and cooperative outcomes depends on both the level and type of trust.     

International Joint Ventures: Partnering Skills and Cross-Cultural Issues

Cooperative activity has become an important element of strategic behaviour and, with increasing globalisation, many alliances are being formed across national boundaries, with the attendant challenges of surmounting linguistic and other cultural barriers. This article provides new perspectives on the partnering skills needed for success in such international joint ventures (IJVs). Based on the analysis of 60 personal interviews from a sample of 20 Anglo-European JVs, four categories of skills are analysed: inter-partner skills, managing the IJV managers, the “upward management” skills of IJV managers managing the ‘parent’ partners, and those of managing the IJV itself. The article presents a matrix to examine the four categories of skill in the context in which each are used. Serving both as an analytical device and a diagnostic tool, this matrix offers results that have important implications for the management of IJVs with regard to the selection and training of managers and the inculcation of the skills required for each level of operation.     

Informal Mentoring as an Organisational Resource

Mentoring is a mechanism for supporting junior managers but until now little research on the benefits to the organisation has been reported. This paper reports on a survey of managers in a UK local government authority to ascertain their views of the benefits of informal mentoring to the organisation. Both mentors and protégés perceived mentoring as investment in a future pool of managers and a tool for the management of change. Mentoring was also seen as assisting in the transfer of knowledge, organisational learning and cross-departmental communication—in other words, as nodes in an information network. Further research is suggested into mentoring as a micro-level knowledge-producing community of practice. As informal mentoring is likely to bring longer-term advantages to the organisation, the paper also discusses how to capture the benefits of informal mentoring when designing formal schemes.