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With data from the 2003 and 2005 National Minority Business Owners Survey, we examined the extent to which minority business owners differ from nonminority business owners in their reported use of adjustment strategies, and the relationship between the use of adjustment strategies and perceived business success. The sample consisted of 193 African American, 200 Mexican American, 200 Korean American, and 210 white business owners. Mexican American and Korean American business owners reported higher levels of adjustment strategy use than African American and white business owners. The ordinary least squares show that reallocating family resources to meet business needs and reallocating business resources to meet family needs were negatively associated with perceived business success, whereas hiring paid help was positively associated with perceived business success.

Following an alarm signal from a control chart it may be necessary to conduct an adjustment to bring the process mean towards a target value. Addresses the problem of how such an adjustment should be made, based on the use of an EWMA control chart, including the special case in which the EWMA is equivalent to the Shewhart chart. The distribution of the EWMA statistic, at the occurrence of an alarm signal, is approximated by applying a Markov chain approach. This distribution is used to obtain a maximum likelihood estimator of the process mean. Adjustment strategies are defined based on the EWMA statistic, the ML‐estimator and a modification of the ML‐estimator. Compares the performance of these adjustment strategies in a simulation study, although the Shewhart case allowed for a simplified treatment requiring no simulation. Results indicate that adjustment based on the ML‐estimator provides substantial improvement over the EWMA statistic when the smoothing constant of the control chart is moderate or high. When the smoothing constant is given a very low value the EWMA statistic provides the preferable adjustment strategy. Differences between control chart designs were less substantial than the differences between adjustment strategies for a given control chart.

Drawing upon Folkman and Lazarus’ (1984) coping framework and interdependence theory (Thibaut and Kelley, 1959), the purpose of this paper is to investigate how expatriate spouses’ coping strategies (problem-focused and emotion-focused) affect expatriate spouse adjustment and expatriate adjustment. In addition, the authors also examine the mediating effect of expatriate adjustment on the spouse coping strategies-spouse adjustment relationship.

To test these relationships, the authors collected multi-source data from 191 expatriate spouses and their expatriate partners living in 37 countries.

The results revealed that problem- and emotion-focused coping strategies positively and negatively, respectively, influenced all types of spouse adjustment: personal, interaction, and cultural. Both forms of spouse coping also influenced expatriate adjustment. The authors also found that expatriate adjustment mediated the relationship between expatriate spouses’ coping strategies and spouse adjustment.

The results suggest that multinational organizations should pay equal attention to the adjustment of both their expatriates and their spouses. Both expatriates and their spouses should be included in the initial selection process and in pre-departure training to get well equipped before the international assignment. Training spouses to adopt problem-focused coping strategies would help to facilitate the effective adjustment of both spouses and expatriates.

The research provides one of the first examinations that investigate expatriate spouses’ coping strategies and their impact on expatriate and expatriate spouse adjustment. This research also highlights the interdependency of expatriates and their spouses.

The purpose of this paper is to jointly analyse external adjustment (environment‐strategy) and internal adjustment (strategy‐structure), and their influence on firm performance in a set of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) of a European‐Mediterranean region in order to check whether models mainly validated in US firms are applied in this context.

Following a quantitative methodological approach, a survey was applied to a sample of 91 SMEs of Alicante (Spain) from different industries in order to contrast nine hypotheses. Various statistical procedures were used, such as cluster analysis and analysis of variance (ANOVA). Moreover, external and internal adjustment indices have been created.

Findings show that traditional theoretical models are not exactly applicable in a context of European‐Mediterranean SMEs. Cost leadership strategy is not associated with a favourable environment, and innovation differentiation strategy is not associated with organic structures. The relationship between adjustment and performance is partially confirmed.

The caveats normally associated with survey methods apply, as do those related to the use of cross‐sectional and managerial perceptions data. Besides, the findings are limited to SMEs.

Implications for SME managers regarding the fit between environment, strategy, structure and its effect on performance are addressed. The results can serve as guidelines that will help managers in the formulation and adoption of their strategies.

The interest of this paper is that two issues often treated separately are now jointly analysed: internal and external adjustments. Moreover, it supplies empirical evidence of these issues in a European‐Mediterranean region, in which no similar studies have been carried out until now.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a human resource management perspective of the workforce adjustment strategies implemented at workplaces in Britain in response to the Great Recession.

The analysis uses an ordered probit and a series of binomial probits to examine a micro data set from the 2011 Workplace Employment Relations Study.

Not all workplaces were affected equally by the recession. Not all workplaces chose to implement workforce adjustment strategies consequential of the recession, although the probability of a workplace taking no action decreased the greater the adverse effect of the recession on the workplace. Most workplaces used a combination of workforce adjustment strategies. Workplaces implemented strategies more compatible with labour hoarding than labour shedding, i.e., cutting/freezing wages and halting recruitment to fill vacant posts rather than making employees redundant.

What was examined was the incidence of the workforce adjustment strategies, not the number of employees affected by the implementation of a strategy. Further, what was examined were outcomes. What is not known are the processes by which these outcomes were arrived at.

This paper concurs with the findings of previous economic studies that workplaces hoarded labour, cut hours and lowered pay. In so doing, however, it provides a more detailed and more informed human resource management perspective of these adjustment strategies.

The majority of organizational newcomers have prior work experience. Organizational socialization tactics are less effective for such “experienced newcomers”, relative to graduate newcomers. Hence experienced newcomers tend to rely on their own actions to become socialized. The aim of this article is to assess and potentially extend the range of adjustment strategies identified as being used by experienced newcomers themselves to achieve positive adjustment.

Semi‐structured interviews were conducted with 86 experienced newcomers entering a professional services organization.

Nineteen strategies emerged, with seven newly identified in this research. These are compared with strategies found in past research.

HR, and the managers and colleagues of newcomers can use the strategies identified and categorized here to encourage newcomers to use organizationally‐appropriate behaviors. Newcomers can use these strategies to help themselves achieve their own adjustment goals.

There is an increasing focus on newcomer proactive behavior in organizational socialization research, yet there are few empirically grounded developments of newcomer adjustment strategies. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper to focus on what experienced newcomers report doing to help themselves adjust.

The globalization of work has contributed to a great increment in cross-cultural interactions, contributing to a new impetus in the expatriates’ topic. The costs associated with the failed international missions are high, and the identification of effective adjustment strategies is of extreme importance, both for organizations and for individuals. The purpose of this paper is to identify the kind of practices that are developed by organizations and their impact on the adjustment of expatriates.

To achieve the proposed objective, a systematic review of literature (from the late 1980s to the present day) will be carried out.

Based on five articles on the topic, the results show that there are few studies that assess the impact of the types of adjustment to organizational practices, with the cross-cultural training and language training being the most common. These practices have shown a positive effect on performance and adjustment of expatriates.

The authors feel the lack of studies that have adequate indicators to measure the integration and effectiveness of the adjustment of expatriates.

Despite the increase of recent immigrant newcomers (RINs) into the workforce over the past few years, many employers still face the challenge of successfully integrating RINs into the workplace. To this end, the purpose of this paper is to propose customized socialization tactics for RINs and highlight the role of RINs’ adjustment strategies in order to facilitate their workplace adjustment.

Drawing on immigrants, socialization, and diversity literatures, the paper develops a conceptual model of the socialization process for RINs and advances propositions to be empirically tested.

The paper proposes that customized socialization tactics by organizations and adjustment strategies by RINs would facilitate RINs’ socialization process by increasing their social integration and role performance, the factors which would ultimately help in their workplace adjustment.

The proposed customized socialization tactics add to the extant socialization literature by highlighting the crucial role firms can play in RINs’ socialization process. Additionally, the paper highlights an important role of RINs in their own socialization process.

Organizations need to employ new, different socialization tactics to help integrate RINs in the workplace. RINs may find the research outcomes useful in acknowledging their own role for successful workplace integration.

This paper presents a new way of looking at organizational socialization tactics for RINs while highlighting a role of RINs themselves, and concludes by discussing theoretical, practical, and societal implications for organizations employing RINs.

Disruptions at ports may destroy the planned ship schedules profoundly, which is an imperative operation problem that shipping companies need to overcome. This paper attempts to help shipping companies cope with port disruptions through recovery scheduling.

This paper studies the ship coping strategies for the port disruptions caused by severe weather. A novel mixed-integer nonlinear programming model is proposed to solve the ship schedule recovery problem (SSRP). A distributionally robust mean conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) optimization model was constructed to handle the SSRP with port disruption uncertainties, for which we derive tractable counterparts under the polyhedral ambiguity sets.

The results show that the size of ambiguity set, confidence level and risk-aversion parameter can significantly affect the optimal values, decision-makers should choose a reasonable parameter combination. Besides, sailing speed adjustment and handling rate adjustment are effective strategies in SSRP but may not be sufficient to recover the schedule; therefore, port skipping and swapping are necessary when multiple or longer disruptions occur at ports.

Since the port disruption is difficult to forecast, we attempt to take the uncertainties into account to achieve more meaningful results. To the best of our knowledge, there is barely a research study focusing on the uncertain port disruptions in the SSRP. Moreover, this is the first paper that applies distributionally robust optimization (DRO) to deal with uncertain port disruptions through the equivalent counterpart of DRO with polyhedral ambiguity set, in which a robust mean-CVaR optimization formulation is adopted as the objective function for a trade-off between the expected total costs and the risk.

The purpose of this paper is to report on research which addressed two purposes. First, to test the fit between, the theoretical model, and the empirical findings from an earlier reported study. Secondly, to test the extrapolative and interrelated nature of a two sets of cultural adjustment constructs designed to enhance the personal wellbeing and intra‐cultural interaction of cross‐border managers when on foreign assignments.

Data were collected from 244 cross‐border managers working for Australian private sector businesses in South‐East Asia in two broad industry groups: manufacturing/industrial, and financial/services. Respondents were asked to complete a questionnaire based on two separate dimensions associated with an individual's adjustment to cross‐border circumstances vis., personal wellbeing and intra‐cultural interaction. This paper evaluates the measurement fit between the identified constructs, by first examining any significant relationship though a structural equation model using LISREL 8; and then through employing path analysis.

Results from the structural equation modeling were significant; and suggest a sound fit between the theoretical model and the empirical findings. The path analysis further supports the multidimensional model. The results provide direction for organisations in addressing cultural adjustment issues to support the personal wellbeing; and the intra‐cultural interaction; of cross‐border managers.

Future research will need to consider the potential for measurement invariance associated with the framework identified in this paper.

The overall results provide useful insights for organisations as to important interventions to assist cross‐managers in becoming more attuned to their new job, business and cultural surroundings and circumstances. In this respect, cross‐border organisations need to include such interventions amongst the “adjustment experiences” for their cross‐border managers in developing personal wellbeing skills and intra‐cultural interaction strategies.