Search results

Entrepreneurial mindsets differ in diverse cultural contexts affecting the perceptions of business opportunity as well as the strategic posture and how to network to successfully implement it. For example, many scholars have shown that risk taking and proactiveness (i.e., characteristics of the strategic posture) are affected by cultural characteristics. The aim of the chapter is to shed light on the relationship between socio-cultural practices (using the GLOBE cultural theoretical framework) and entrepreneurial behavior understanding how culture may foster or hinder the entrepreneurial mindsets. The authors discuss how certain cultural dimensions may be linked to various aspects of entrepreneurial mindsets. Furthermore, the authors make some reflections with regard to the contextual conditions shaped by cultural factors that seem to be the most appropriate to spread the Humane Entrepreneurship Model.

This chapter introduces the new expanded strategic posture for entrepreneurship in the XXI century, defining the Humane Entrepreneurship (HumEnt). HumEnt is conceived as a framework to capture what is happening in the present-day landscape. In particular, HumEnt focal dimension is represented by a strategic posture called Humane Entrepreneurial Orientation that is able to capture the Entrepreneurial Orientation (EO), the Sustainability Orientation (SO), and the Humane Resource Orientation (HRO) of the firm. After a discussion on the theoretical basis of HumEnt, the chapter concludes with the identification of four different types of HumEnt firms.

Dramatic economic, political, and societal changes at local, national, and global levels, along with commitments to achieve Education for All (EFA) and Millennium Development Goals (UNESCO, 2000), are prompting national education leaders around the world to restructure and reenvision their education systems (OECD, 2008; Olson, 2008). Decentralization is one of the key structural changes governments are using to promote greater efficiency and to increase local participation in education related to decision making, finances, and accountability in schools. As the Ministry of Education (MOE) of the Sultanate of Oman makes the shift to a decentralized structure, it recognizes that its school administrators require new leadership skills in order to make the necessary changes. Implementing decentralization requires a shift in principals' work and thus their professional identity. “By building the leadership capacity of principals as leaders at the school level, (Oman's) MOE officials hope to strengthen the principals' ability to implement school reforms for the 21st century” (Seward International, Inc., 2008, p. 6).

While the entrepreneurship literature historically supported the idea that the center and finality of the research is the entrepreneur or the entrepreneurial firm, current developments highlight the importance of the context in which the entrepreneur or the entrepreneurial firm operates. This modern view challenges how the entrepreneurship field has been evolved and illustrates the transformation of the research that calls for an accurate overview of where the entrepreneurship field is going. This chapter aims at providing the historical evolution of the field of entrepreneurship by highlighting the state of the art, the main theories, the research gaps, the trends, the current research discussion, and where the field of entrepreneurship is going. Thanks to this historical view, scholars could learn of the origins of the field, how the research discussion has been evolved and how some popular trends appear or disappear and therefore find some research directions and a future research agenda for the future of entrepreneurship.

The paper displays the cultural profile of the Russian management and explores the different roles of factors linked to the history of Russia and current transition to market and democracy. It further develops interpretation of empirical data collected through the Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness (GLOBE) research project. The survey of managers of multinational companies doing business in Russia tests the cultural profile of the Russian management and confirms the behavioral advantages (visible In-group and Institutional Collectivism) and disadvantages (low Uncertainty Avoidance and Assertiveness) of this culture.

We develop a new look on leadership for innovation and propose that effective leaders alternate between a broad range of behaviors and tune their approach to the changing demands of innovation. This is referred to as ambidextrous leadership. As the importance of different leader behaviors varies not only across time but also across contexts, ambidextrous leadership takes different shapes depending on contextual conditions. We discuss culture as an important contextual condition that holds implications for effective ambidextrous leadership. Cultures have different strengths and weaknesses for innovation that can be leveraged or compensated. We use the cultural characteristics identified by the GLOBE project to discuss how leaders can take culture into account when leading for innovation.

This chapter aims to consider workplace spirituality from a cross-cultural perspective. The terms workplace spirituality and culture are so intangible, and both start with the attitude and behavior of humans but are meaningful in a community. Because of the constraint of understanding these abstract settings, it is necessary to define and specify the dimensions of both concepts to achieve the aim of this chapter. In this regard, the section starts with the conceptuality of workplace spirituality and the dimensions of the term, which cumulate at individual, group, and organizational levels. It goes with the part of cultural dimensions in the light of Hofstede's (2001) direction, Chhokar, Brodbeck, and House's (2007) extension, and Sharma's (2010) derivation of cultural dimensions for national, organizational, and individual levels, respectively. After joining the dots, the chapter focuses on one of the most sacred research areas for academic literature, cross-cultural differences, and workplace spirituality. The last part of the chapter is the conclusion to point to final notes about the concepts and help guide future studies.

A well-coordinated public sector is often considered to be of major importance, but at the same time it appears to be a huge challenge. Public sector reforms struggling with the coordination conundrum are numerous and countries display a certain dynamic in their adoption of coordination instruments throughout time. On the one hand, it is sensible to presume that – to a certain extent – countries are stimulated to adopt similar coordination instruments, because of isomorphic processes induced by factors such as the spread of the new public management line of thought or the multiplication of exchanges of good practices at an international level. On the other hand, culture-linked elements might have an important role to play in explaining idiosyncrasies. By examining the conceptual link between coordination and culture through an empirical analysis for four counties (UK, New Zealand, France, and Sweden), it is the aim of this chapter to explore the relevance of culture for understanding coordination trajectories of individual countries.