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The research presented here contributes to our understanding of strategic planning and its relationship to performance in nonprofit organizations. Based on a sample of 303 nonprofit organizations, the study emphasizes individual and diverse elements of the planning process. Multiple measures of performance highlight a nonprofits need to garner resource contributions from several constituencies. Using factor analysis and canonical correlation analysis, we find a positive association between scope of planning and executive satisfaction and a negative association between administrative informality and volunteer involvement. Our results suggest that two critical resource contributors, executive directors and donors, may not value formalized decision-making and planning to the extent previously assumed.

Research in escalating commitment has shown that escalation situations are primarily a function of psychological traits such as self‐justification and risk propensity. However, the extent to which these factors affect decision making is dependent upon a number of variables which include the situation, the level of commitment, and the cultural norms involved No studies to date examine the relationship between escalating commitment and cultural values. The purpose of this paper is to extend the work on escalating commitment by examining it from an international perspective. Research propositions explore cultural values and their impact on the escalation of commitment process.

There has been a genuine lack of emphasis in the management and public policy literature on cultural issues in Latin America. This is particularly evident in the ethics and marketing literature. In this paper, the results from two studies are presented which address moral and marketing differences between the United States and Ecuador. In the first study, a comprehensive survey (which includes vignettes for ecological conservation, bribery, sex discrimination, and child labor dilemmas) is administered to 98 multinational managers from the U.S. and Ecuador. Results indicate that certain

The aim of the paper is to examine the scope, level and content of business ethics research in three leading international business (IB) journals: Journal of International Business Studies (JIBS), Journal of World Business (JWB) and Management International Review (MIR). A subsequent examination of comparable themes published in the Journal of Business Ethics (JBE) is performed to establish commonalities and gaps on the topic of IB ethics between the leading IB journals and the leading business ethics journal.

A total of 42 articles are identified in JIBS, JWB and MIR that are deemed IB ethics research, and 62 articles in JBE over the same timeframe. A content analysis of these articles is conducted.

The main thematic clusters in the three IB journals are ethical judgment analyses, violation of laws and regulations, national moral environments, and corporate governance. Codes of ethics are an underlying issue across many of these themes but this is not explicitly studied. Articles published in JBE show a wider range of themes than those published in the three IB journals.

A broader selection of business ethics journals and of leading management journals that do not focus exclusively on IB could have produced additional important themes. Even so, there is an opportunity for IB ethics research to get into as yet unexamined important themes.

The ethical themes identified can help managers in their efforts to deliver focused and clustered ethical training.

This study establishes the themes that have been of interest to the authors and editors of academic articles in leading IB journals. What appears in such journals directly influences the research, teaching, and ultimately practice of IB. Such a perspective has not been studied in the past.

In this issue of the International Journal of Organization Theory and Behavior a myriad of topics are covered with an eye toward culture, change, and development in Latin America. The actual special issue theme of “Cross-cultural issues in Latin America” was somewhat broadly defined by design. Because this corner of the world has received little attention in the management and public administration literature, I thought that it would be interesting to dedicate an entire issue to this topic. As the Western Hemisphere continues to build cultural and economic bridges, it will be inevitable that many social science researchers will follow suit with more interest.1

The purpose of this paper is to develop a value measurement tool based on an indigenous theory of cultural values. Moreover, this instrument was tested in a multi‐cultural sample from Peru.

A cultural values framework that traces its origins to Peru is employed as the conceptual foundation for a new instrument designed to measure values that are inherently linked to economic and social development. The survey is tested across diverse subcultures within Peru through 288 respondents.

The empirical results lend significant support to three hypotheses and a number of differences related to how certain values may be perceived in varying subcultural communities were identified. Perhaps the most striking finding is that Peruvians from different subcultural groups vary in their perceptions of which values are key to successful assimilation into the local indigenous communities as well as the values necessary for achieving success in international business.

By developing and testing a developmental values instrument that was based on developing nation constructs we have created an opportunity for replication in other developing nations as well as industrialized economies.

A number of implications related to managing in Andean America are plausible. These results can assist multi‐national firms that elect to operate in the Andes to evaluate their marketing and sales approaches, as well as human resource management policies. In addition firms that seek new growth opportunities within Andean America may need to incorporate predetermined values that are germane to their potential strategic maneuvers in the region.

This paper is exploratory in nature and facilitates a deeper level of analysis related to subcultural values in developing nations.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how country-of-origin (COO) perceptions of managers affect their provider selection for offshoring and offshore-outsourcing of services. In particular, it examines how economic and cultural attributes of the supplier’s host nation shape these choices and identifies whether these attributes have a substitutive, complementary, or competing relationship.

A quantitative study was performed using data collected from 235 managers in Saudi Arabia, which has relatively homogeneous managerial population with a clear significant cultural attribute and so presents an ideal setting to study the theory developed in this paper. Data were analyzed using a repeated-measures analysis of variance and a repeated-measures and doubly multivariate analysis of variance.

Building on signaling theory, it is shown that buyers from developing countries prefer suppliers from developed rather than culturally distant developing economies as stronger institutions in developed nations increase the credibility of firms. It is also shown that they prefer suppliers from developing countries that share a common cultural attribute such as religion over other developing countries, supporting social identification behavior and a substitutive relationship between cultural and economic attributes. Finally, they are indifferent between suppliers located in a developed and in a culturally similar developing country, even when the cost of obtaining the service is the same in both countries. In such cases, economic and cultural COO attributes have a competing relationship in provider selection.

It would be interesting to examine if the results of the current study extend to cultural attributes/cues other than religion that may shrink the social distance between buyers and suppliers.

Service multinationals from developing countries may struggle to establish credibility in the eyes of potential customers, who consistently evaluate them lower than firms in developed markets or firms from developing countries that share a common social trait with the potential customers. They can compensate for this by adopting policies that enhance pre-contract trust, invest in homogeneity capital that decreases the social distance between the two firms, or by focussing their sales efforts on countries with which they share a social/cultural attribute.

This paper contributes to the marketing and international business literatures by providing insights on how firms from developing countries can effectively compete in the global marketplace given COO effects. Overall, the results provide novel evidence of the importance of co-membership in transnational communities (for instance, religious groups across countries) in supplier selection and its relationship to economic attributes.

In recent years, the significance of offering value to service customers rivals the provision of satisfaction and service quality. The growing importance of the construct is especially apparent in the fast food industry as evidenced by the international popularity of value menus offered by many fast food franchises. The service value trend is particularly relevant in Latin America as more multinational service franchises compete for newfound market share. Zeithaml, in her comprehensive analysis of the service value construct, suggests that service value perceptions emerge when consumers weigh their perceptions of service quality against the necessary sacrifices made to acquire the service. In the current study, this conceptual model is tested using samples derived from fast food consumers in both Ecuador and the USA. The objective is to perform an empirical test of Zeithaml’s model and to compare the relative importance attached to the components of her model across the two samples. An additional consideration is an analysis of the effect of gender on the purchase behaviour of these consumers. The research and managerial implications of the study are considered, as are the research limitations.

This study examines how various characteristics of the discount retail environment and the overall attitude towards a discount retail store, considered to be an abstract and global image component, influence consumers’ satisfaction and how consumers’ satisfaction, in turn, affects store loyalty. The data, collected from a sample of 517 discount retail customers in Daegu, Korea, indicate that: (1) forming the overall attitude is more closely related to in‐store services: atmosphere, employee service, after sales service and merchandising, (2) store satisfaction is formed through perceived store atmosphere and value, (3) the overall attitude has strong influence on satisfaction and loyalty and its impact is much stronger on loyalty than on satisfaction, (4) store loyalty is directly affected by most significantly location, merchandising and after sale service in order, (5) satisfaction is not related to customers’ committed store revisiting behavior. The applications in management and implications for future research are discussed.

Competition and entrepreneurship are driving forces in the development of economic systems. They create jobs, new opportunities to generate value, and lead to the fulfillment of personal career and life goals. As such, it is important to understand the basic economic and cultural factors that influence these activities in developing economies. We undertook a series of analyses in an examination of a heterogeneous sample of economic zones in Southeast Asia. Results illustrate relations between national culture, human development, and business and growth competitiveness. Implications hold that human development and power distance are enablers of entrepreneurial activities in these cultural and national settings. Our contribution is instrumental to development of public policy and regulatory guidelines for facilitating entrepreneurial activity in the developing economies of Southeast Asia.