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Expatriates who perform poorly in their overseas assignments cost multinational enterprises billions of dollars, damage firm reputation, disrupt relationships with local nationals, and often exact a cost on expatriates’ psychological well‐being. International human resource management, which assumes the crucial responsibility of managing expatriates, should therefore be able to identify the competencies underlying effective expatriate performance, and evaluate crosscultural competence and overall effectiveness. Little research, however, is available on the role of culture in determining cross‐cultural effectiveness in expatriate‐client interactions. Moreover, it is rarely acknowledged that the customer impacts upon the effectiveness of such interactions. This paper provides a theoretical explication of the relationships between the factors of intercultural effectiveness, sociobiographical characteristics, and perceived task and contextual performance of individual managers operating in an intercultural environment. Qualitative research is conducted which, in general, demonstrates the importance of examining intercultural effectiveness from the respective cultural perspectives of the expatriate and the host country client. The findings elucidate the factors contributing to the intercultural effectiveness of Western expatriate managers operating in intercultural teams in Thailand.

Advances the argument that Western management must increasingly decode the organizational and cultural features of Japanese‐style management – if managerial conflict is to be reduced in joint ventures, subsidiaries, mergers, and relocations – and if Western management is to consider alternatives to its current approaches to quality production. Analyses total quality control (TQC) management as representative of the successful approach to Japanese management. TQC, built around culturally indigenous views of amal (interdependency), muri (excess), muda (waste), and mura (unevenness), contrasts with partial quality measures utilized in Western organizations. Key Japanese features are elimination and/or restructuring of quality control departments and specialists, designation of quality control to the production line, reduction of lot size, utilization of “U‐shaped lines” and a “just‐in‐time” modus operandi.

This study aims to, first, identify how service perception can differ depending on the customers’ cultural background during intercultural encounters and, second, provide useful and specific directions of more culturally competent service interaction to restaurant managers and servers in US restaurants. Effective exchanges between service providers and international customers are important to ensure the success of restaurants. While frequently and explicitly checking in on customers is common in the USA, this may not be preferable to people from different cultures.

Study 1 (n = 975) utilized a survey, and Study 2 (n = 145) used an experimental design to, first, examine cultural differences between American and Japanese participants in their preferences about restaurant servers’ check-back style and, second, examined the moderating effect of culture (i.e. American and Japanese culture) on the relationship between the servers’ check-back behavior and the evaluations of service effectiveness, emotional response and the intention to return to a restaurant.

The results showed that the frequency of a server’s visits had a positive effect on evaluations of service effectiveness, emotional response and intent to revisit for the Americans, but not for the Japanese.

This research has practical implications for restaurant managers and servers who are expected to interact with international customers. They can apply the findings of this research to examine culturally appropriate check-back styles, which are an important attribute of effectiveness in intercultural service encounters in US restaurants.

The current study indicates that providing standardized service to all customers, regardless of cultural differences, might not be ideal.

International business endeavors require people to communicate across cultural and national boundaries. For the past 20 years scholars have explored the ways in which culture influences work, habits and values, communication styles, and business practices. Along with the trend toward a global economy, there is today a greater recognition among specialists that cultural differences affect all facets of international business. Because of this, librarians serving practitioners and scholars of international business are challenged to provide information aimed at making the business professional more productive in culturally diverse environments. Provides a brief overview of the topic of cultural diversity in business literature. Follows this with an extensive bibliography of current English‐language works offering theoretical and applied approaches to this theme. Includes an annotated list of organizations involved in the cultural aspects of international business.