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The purpose of this paper is to bridge the boundaries separating strategic and comparative institutional perspectives on human resource systems and employment relations. Each research tradition has investigated the role and outcomes of corporations as they operate in an increasingly global economy. Researchers in these traditions, however, ask different research questions and draw on distinct social science disciplines, theoretical assumptions, and research methodologies. While they have pursued parallel but separate tracks, we argue that they have important lessons for each other. In this paper, we review the core characteristics and critiques of each research tradition, provide a series of examples of efforts to bridge their differences, and offer suggestions for future integration.

In recent years, theory and research have been increasingly devoted to understanding organizational behavior in cross-cultural and global contexts, with particular attention being paid to the appropriateness of various human resources management (HRM) practices because practices that may be effective within one cultural context may not be effective in other cultural contexts. This chapter argues that a multi-level perspective is needed to explain the interplay between HRM practices and employee responses across cultural contexts. Specifically, the multi-level framework developed in this chapter elucidates the importance of fit between HRM practices, individual values, organizational values, and societal values. Societal values play a key role in the adoption of HRM practices, and the effectiveness of these HRM practices will depend largely on “fit” or alignment with the values of the societal culture in which the organization is operating. HRM practices also shape the collective responses of employees through organizational climate at the organizational level and through psychological climate at the individual level. For positive employee attitudes and responses to emerge, the climate created by the HRM practices must be aligned with societal and individual values. Building on these notions, the strength of the societal culture in which the organization is operating serves as a mechanism that links relationships between climate, value fit, and attitudes across levels of analysis. The chapter concludes with some recommendations for future research and implications for practice.

Aumann and Ostroff proposed a very comprehensive framework that attempts to identify the antecedents, mediators, moderators, and consequences of human resource management (HRM) in cross-cultural contexts. It is an ambitious framework that spans three levels of analysis (society, organization, and individual) with mechanisms of fit occurring at both the macro- and microlevels, focuses on both structure and process, and identifies cross-level interactions. The authors considered organizational and psychological climate as the key integration between culture and employee responses, and in this process inadvertently dismissed the function of organizational culture. We propose an organizational perspective on multi-level cultural integration and discuss its implication for cross-cultural HRM, highlighting the role of organizational culture as the major focus for integration with a host country's societal culture and its local employees’ values. The analysis is enriched by considering the strength of both organizational and societal culture and the cultural distance between the home and host country of the multinational firm. We identify how our approach has both augmented and simplified Aumann and Ostroff's framework to facilitate future research.

In this contribution, we systematically review the extant global leadership literature to identify important bibliometric and thematic patterns in evidence in this evolving field of scholarship. Conceptualizing the phenomenon to include leaders/managers/supervisors who hold global, expatriate, or international positions, we draw out insights accumulated from a total of 327 published articles in key management and organizational behavior journals listed in Scopus. Our analysis proceeds in two sequential phases. Our bibliometric analysis first identifies the most cited articles, most published first authors, country bases of first authors, and frequently publishing journals in this field. This characterizes both the diversity and innovative nature of scholarship in the field. Our thematic content analysis, generated through Nvivo 11, isolates two dominant overarching themes that represent the wellspring for the body of literature, namely global leader development and global leader effectiveness. These themes of development and effectiveness are further explicated through six distinct lenses namely cultural, cognitive, learning, personality trait, social/relational, and political. These lenses are underpinned by a suite of theoretical perspectives encompassing individual, system, and contextual considerations. In combination, these sets of analyses bring added systematics to the field and serve as a point of departure for future inquiry.

This chapter reports the current status of management practices in the Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) region as seen by international expatriates. Based on the results and expert insights, we aim at giving guidance to MNE leaders and strategy makers as well as operative HRM staff and other expatriate managers how to best exploit the value-added opportunities in the CEE region by adopting the region-specific talent management and staffing policies and practices.

This study is based on the views of 1108 managers on the local management in six CEE countries: Bulgaria, Czechia,¹

In this chapter, the term Czechia is used to refer to the Czech Republic.

MNEs have been able to successfully capitalize on the economic integration and growth of the CEE region during the past 25 years. A new generation of competitive local managers is now growing into leadership positions, but MNEs need to find a more sophisticated way to retain those in the region in order to be able to exploit growth opportunities in future too.

Because the national cultural differences between the six analyzed CEE countries remain very characteristic and divergent, talent management and staffing strategies and policies of MNEs must be adopted and fine-tuned accordingly. Language and communication difficulties, knowledge of the standards management techniques are not a challenge anymore. Instead local management’s soft skills, leadership values and attitudes need to be developed now simultaneously with increasing wages, as the most talented local staff and management is readily relocating into higher-wage countries.

The originality and scholarly interest of this study lies in its cross-cultural, comparative approach. The originality and practical interest of this study is that it gives clear recommendations to MNE and expat managers. Furthermore the presented results have been tested during critical forum discussions with more than 60 CEE-experienced managers, expatriates, and the representatives several foreign chambers of trade and commerce held at the Central European University Business School in spring 2015.

Immigrants are important contributors to workplaces, but HRM scholars have only recently begun to study them systematically. We document the prevalence and cross-national variation in populations of immigrant employees. Going beyond a treatment that considers them as another element of diversity, we propose how gradients of status at each level of country, organization, and work group admittance can result in unique outcomes for immigrants who are equally (dis)similar. We offer a taxonomy of immigrant pathways into their destination countries to explore the status hierarchies they are assigned by governments and reinforced by organizations. We provide insights into the ascribed status of immigrants and develop a typology of individual and organizational acculturation strategies based on the cultural tightness and looseness of the destination and origin cultures. We then describe how the reactions of members of an immigrant employee’s social environment are sensitive to ascribed status and cultural tightness-looseness. We do so in a three-stage process that begins with immigrant categorization, followed by conferral of (il)legitimacy, and finally brought together with perceptions of outcome interdependence. Finally, we offer ideas about HRM interventions to guide management scholars in their quest for understanding and improve the experiences of immigrants in the workplace.