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This article explores trust in the managerial context of integrity, performance and benevolence in contemporary Asian societies. Empirical evidence is drawn from three small Asian societies where reform and transitions characterise the current socio‐economic scene. As these countries attempt their recovery process from the severe economic downturn of mid 1997, managers of work organisations are calling on unique Asian ways of responding to global imperatives. Trust may be considered as a unique feature in these countries and it may be considered to be a central element defining the managerial frameworks. Indeed, the study findings allow us to suggest that trust is perceived strongly by the managers in these countries to be not only as the key critical assumptions but also it defined internal and external relationships.

This study assessed the relevance of Vroom’s expectancy motivational framework in a cross-cultural context. Differences in attitudes for task investment, preferences for work related achievements, and the reward potential of outcomes was assessedwith Australians and Malaysians who were employed in similar work contexts of the beauty care industry. Reasons why the Australian employees reported significantly higher job motivation than the Malaysian respondents were identified by examining the three main components of expectancy, instrumentality and valence, of Vroom’s framework. The study findings are discussed in terms of the implications they have for the necessary organizational development with Australians and Malaysians who were employed in similar work contexts of the beauty care industry. Reasons why the Australian employees reported significantly higher job motivation than the Malaysian respondents were identified by examining the three main components of expectancy, instrumentality and valence, of Vroom's framework. The study findings are discussed in terms of the implications they have for the necessary organizational development of businesses in the competitive Asia-Pacific region.

A need to facilitate effective international business encounters, which are underpinned by the personal values of managers, has led to significant pragmatic interest in understanding work goals cross‐culturally. This study examines the work goals of 468 managers from the three industrializing nations of Brunei, Malaysia and Singapore. The results reveal some consensuses as well as differences in managerial work goals. The three dominant work goals included opportunity to learn, interesting work and good match with abilities and experience. Implications for the findings are discussed.

This study reports the changing perceptions of work goals in a transitional society. Mongolia embraced market ideology in the decade of the 1990s after 70 years as a centrally planned economic system. This study of 208 managers points to interesting directions for many similar countries in central Asia undertaking deliberate and wide‐ranging changes. This paper departs from the traditional research approach in terms of its context specificity and in the recognition that no study of this nature has been previously undertaken.

Outlines the impact of economic reform in India at the organisational level by exploring relationships between the societal priorities of the new reform context and espoused work goal priorities of very senior Indian managers in key economic sectors. The paper attempts to capture the shift in work goals of senior managers during the period of current reform. Empirical evidence gathered through a survey of 421 senior Indian managers sponsored by the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, forms the basis of this paper. The empirical analysis points to an increasing convergence in reform values amongst senior managers, on the one hand, while demonstrating an absence of wider social vision, on the other.

Explores relationships between relevant work setting variables in a Hong Kong organization. The study examined a set of Western assumptions in terms of structural properties of centralization and formalization and the view that they will be negatively associated with workplace responses of motivation, job satisfaction and organizational commitment, while an enriched job content will be positively related to employee responses. There was empirical support for most of the connections of this framework, but formalization was observed to have positive relationships with employee perceptions and affections. In addition, there was evidence that the responses of the incumbents were influenced by the assessed demographic characteristics. These results provide further evidence that organizational members pay moderate attention to demographic attributes, yet this factor has not been a prominent component of contemporary job design research. The findings are reported in terms of the need to consider both demographic and sociocultural effects when explaining responses of individual employees.

This paper aims to investigate the importance of talent management (TM) as a fundamental component of management philosophy and practice to auger contemporary competitiveness in Chinese organisations, which have forged transformational synergies with traditional forms of political intervention and capital investment.

A pluralist design was used, in which the quantitative and qualitative assessment was adopted with Chinese decision-making executives of corporations operating in the global arena. By using managerial responses, this paper offered a more nuanced and grounded understanding of TM in general.

Although the results revealed that the concept of TM gained a significant footprint in the studied organisations, the influence of cultural nuances and organisational structural processes restrict the practice of TM, and, indeed, there is a need to have a Chinese characteristic.

This research underlies the importance of intensifying critical scrutiny of the relativity of TM, organisational practices and cultural heritage when developing future organisational leaders.

The instruments for assessing the phenomena of TM and related concepts encourage legitimacy to extend the limited empirical research with more industries across different geographical regions in China.

This paper addresses an under-researched area of world importance, namely, the critical role of TM, which is to optimise these scant resources in the worthy pursuit of economic and political stability in both the domestic and global contexts.

This research investigated the effect of changing the workplace of a central administrative cell from a traditional bureaucratic structure to a team orientated quality focused unit. Responses from the members of an university administration group adopting a quality intervention were contrasted with reports from another similar service campus group which continued to operate with the functional structure. Questionnaires were administered annually, on three occasions, to these two groups as well as to the clients of the group that underwent the team quality orientated job redesign. The results showed that only the employees in the group, which adopted the team orientation, perceived features of their jobs improved as did their job satisfaction. Moreover, both objective data and perceptual responses, from the clients, indicated that after entering into the new work arrangements the group provided better service quality. The stimulus for this job intervention, and how it was installed, is described. The study findings are discussed in terms of challenges and issues confronting practitioners in the contemporary workplace.

In an increasingly competitive global environment, impacted by a myriad of social, economic and technological forces, managerial roles have, over the past two decades, undergone dramatic transformation. Indeed, managers around the world are struggling to redefine their roles and responsibilities against a backdrop of the classic ten roles of managers espoused by Mintzberg in the 1970s, which were based on research in the US context. Yet these traditional roles are still widely taught in universities and training programs, and particularly all over Asia with the spread of Western business education literature. The relevance of the Mintzberg formulation in the Asian context was the aim of this four country study. The study reports the importance and degree of use of the ten Mintzberg managerial roles in the contemporary Asian context. The findings suggest although the roles overlap considerably, they are acted out in a very different manner. Implications for the findings in an international market arena are discussed.