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Culture has an effect on efforts at management training and development. Experiential exercises have cultural values embedded in them. Transporting training exercises across cultural boundaries represents a challenge full of opportunities and pitfalls. Two American‐made training exercises – a survival exercise and an inter‐unit conflict exercise – were used in a training session composed of Polish academics, who are preparing to enter management development, and training in post‐communist Poland. Polish culture presents both obstacles to experiential learning and opportunities for developing management skills. Comparative analysis is used to assess the match between training method and culture.

Considers how non‐Thais can negotiate successfully withe business and government executives in Thailand. Gives an overview of Thailand’s geography, climate, population, religion and business practice. Discusses important aspects of the social‐cultural environment that have a significant effect on the way Thai’s negotiate. Includes further tips regarding body language, entertainment protocol, how to dress, and favourite negotiating tactics by buyers and sellers. Provides conclusions and directions for further research.

Western management development assistance (MDA) is being viewed with scepticism in Poland – a scepticism fuelled by the rapid proliferation of MDA programmes which sometimes compete with one another, frequently lack intellectual clarity, and often are short‐sighted. Discusses some of the barriers, challenges and opportunities associated with developing MDA programmes for post‐communist countries, presents a method for analysing variables in planning MDA programmes, and offers recommendations for those seeking to develop MDA programmes for post‐communist countries.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the legacies of Carolyn R. Dexter through the lens of a broader perspective on faculty work productivity and impact.

The authors used critical biography, a qualitative methodology, to explore and explain the development and contributions of Carolyn R. Dexter.

Carolyn R. Dexter was both a product and an anomaly of her times. By contemporary academic standards Dexter’s publication productivity was limited, yet her influence was strong on many individuals and organizations. She promoted internationalization of professional organizations and supported gender equality.

The limitation of authors’ interpretation is recognized.

Dexter’s career is an example of faculty work productivity and impact which is broader than publication productivity. This work illustrates the appropriateness of qualitative research, specifically, critical biography, in placing important management figures in context.

Studies focusing on women leadership at The Academy of Management, the preeminent professional association for management and organization scholars, are limited. Carolyn R. Dexter’s leadership provides a roadmap illustrating practical contributions of faculty productivity and impact beyond publications. Throughout her academic life Carolyn Dexter made her faculty work “meaningful” to the organizations in which she worked and to the people she encountered.

Highlights the opinion that the importance of national culture in cross‐cultural management is diminishing, suggesting that the world is moving towards a single, global management culture that is basically Western and, more specifically, American. Attempts to test this hypothesis by examining values held by future managers from five different cultures. Uses the Kruskal‐Wallis One Way ANOVA and the Mann‐Whitney tests to show that future managers from different cultural backgrounds will neigher adopt a mirror image of current management style in their cultures nor a global unified management style regardless of local culture.

For 30 years, critics have noted a number of ailments caused by police rank structure. This paper adds to this literature by exploring the command rank structure of American police organizations in four parts. First, police rank structure is defined. Second, the hypothesized problems and benefits of tall rank structures are culled from the prior literature and described. A review of these contentions finds little reason to believe that tall rank structures are either beneficial or detrimental. Third, a systematic review of empirical studies of a range of organizations reveals that the impact of rank structure on three classes of organizational attributes is not wholly clear. This article closes with suggestions for conducting research to better ascertain the impact of hierarchy on police agencies, and how police executives can apply this knowledge.

This paper is devoted to the topic of how mathematics might be more efficiently used in educational administration. The position taken here is that mathematics is a branch of philosophy whose subject matter is a set of abstract entities and identified operational rules. It is a vocabulary of symbols that can be used to label objects and, more importantly, a set of grammatical rules for using the vocabulary. The paper begins with a review of some recent developments reported in the social science literature on the uses of mathematics in political science, sociology and economics, and ends with some illustrations of how these developments could lead to similar applications in both the practice and theory domains of educational administration.

Martins and Terblanche developed a theoretical framework of the organisational factors that support creativity and innovation, and the current study aims to provide an empirical test of this framework.

Based on a review of existing literature on national culture and previous research into Polish organisations, we developed hypotheses as to the likely position of Polish organisations on these four dimensions. These predictions were tested via a survey of Polish managers from a diverse range of companies.

The key findings related to ownership – partly or fully foreign‐owned companies operating in Poland appeared to be much more enabling of creativity and innovation than their wholly Polish‐owned counterparts.

Nicholson suggested that Polish businesses would benefit greatly from the adoption of at least some western methods, but that there would be significant constraints to their adoption. This research strongly supports this, but being based solely on a Polish sample, requires further research in order to be able to make direct comparison between firms in Poland and firms elsewhere.

One conclusion of this study is that Polish organisations can draw significant benefits from further effective assimilation of western management philosophy and methods.

This paper contributes to the growing literature on organisational determinants of innovation, and on the transfer of western methods to the transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe. It offers insights of interest to managers in Polish businesses and to potential investors in Poland.

Purpose – In this chapter, we review the research on status hierarchies in groups and teams to assess the relative validity of two major models – the dominance and functionalist theories of status hierarchies. We find that these models cannot fully account for empirical evidence in the literature, and thus propose a new model of status hierarchies, Micropolitics.

Methodology/approach – We examine the relative validity of current major theories by reviewing the literature on status hierarchies in groups.

Findings – We find that, although most of the literature supports the functionalist theory of status hierarchies, this theory cannot explain some of the existing empirical evidence. Drawing on both functionalist and dominance perspectives, we propose a new theory of status, the Micropolitics model, to account for this evidence. Specifically, we propose that in the “micro” context of groups and teams, individuals attain status by convincing their group that they possess the skills and abilities needed to take charge – just as political candidates must convince voters they are the right people for the job.

Originality/value of paper – This paper proposes a new theory of status hierarchies in groups that may provide additional explanatory power for status researchers. It suggests that groups strive to attain meritocracy, but may put the wrong people in charge.

Job‐related stress has significant untoward consequences and appears to be wide‐spread. Although job‐related stress has a number of causes, the focus of this study is the stress associated with the lack of alignment between managers’ societal values and the culture of the organization in which the manager works. Using a sample of 78 Greek managers, it is argued that the Eiffel Tower organizational culture, characterized by low levels of decentralization and high levels of formalization, is congruent with the Greek societal values of high power distance and strong uncertainty avoidance, reducing Greek managers’ job‐related stress and increasing their performance. Results indicate that an Eiffel Tower organizational culture/Greek societal culture fit is associated with lower reported job stress but not increased managerial performance. Implications of the results are discussed.