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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.

The causal relationship between money and income (output) has been an important topic and has been extensively studied. However, those empirical studies are almost entirely on Granger-causality in the conditional mean. Compared to conditional mean, conditional quantiles give a broader picture of an economy in various scenarios. In this paper, we explore whether forecasting conditional quantiles of output growth can be improved using money growth information. We compare the check loss values of quantile forecasts of output growth with and without using past information on money growth, and assess the statistical significance of the loss-differentials. Using U.S. monthly series of real personal income or industrial production for income and output, and M1 or M2 for money, we find that out-of-sample quantile forecasting for output growth is significantly improved by accounting for past money growth information, particularly in tails of the output growth conditional distribution. On the other hand, money–income Granger-causality in the conditional mean is quite weak and unstable. These empirical findings in this paper have not been observed in the money–income literature. The new results of this paper have an important implication on monetary policy, because they imply that the effectiveness of monetary policy has been under-estimated by merely testing Granger-causality in conditional mean. Money does Granger-cause income more strongly than it has been known and therefore information on money growth can (and should) be more utilized in implementing monetary policy.

Organizational politics has intrigued academicians and practitioners for decades. Yet, serious scholarship on politics in organizations has emerged as a viable body of scientific inquiry just within the past twenty years. In general, theory and research on organizational politics has been sorted into the two categories of political behavior and its effects, and the nature of organizational politics perceptions. With few exceptions, these areas of inquiry have been treated as largely independent of one another. Whereas it is useful periodically to take stock of the current status of our knowledge base in particular areas of inquiry, we are often remiss in not engaging in such activity frequently enough. The present paper seeks to address this void by determining the status of theory and research on perceptions of organizational politics. First, we report on a comprehensive review of the literature designed to convey the current state of the field with respect to theory development, testing, and validation, as well as methodological considerations, including levels of analysis issues. Then, we propose future challenges with respect to construct expansion and validation, theory refinement, multi-level considerations, and integration with other constructs in the organizational sciences. Other issues that need to be addressed in future work are also examined in an effort to propose a revised model of politics perceptions to guide future research.