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This study examines the method of scenario analysis as a means of exposing hidden assumptions which cause misattributions that lead to multicultural conflict and as a way of assessing cross‐cultural understanding. Results from thirty‐five critical incident interviews of technical professionals and semi‐structured scenario questionnaires from graduate business and engineering students are presented. The results provide support for the use of scenarios as a method of exposing hidden assumptions leading to multicultural conflict and as a process which helps participants deal with the conflict. Implications for organizational research and practice are discussed, including the use of scenario analysis as an evaluation and measurement tool for culturally‐related conflict in organizations.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the importance of a multi-level approach consisting of individual, human resource management (HRM) team, and organizational contingency factors when considering the efficacy of HR devolvement efforts. The authors accomplish this through a review of the relevant devolvement literature to show how outcomes are impacted by contingency factors, which highlights a gap in extant scholarship, and the authors organize the literature in a way that is meaningful to future researchers interested in the topic as well as practitioners involved with its implementation.

The authors use a narrative review approach to describe previous devolvement research (e.g. Hammersley, 2001; Harvey and Moeller, 2009). In contrast to a systematic review more commonly seen in quantitative meta-analyses, a narrative review allows for a more descriptive and detailed analysis and critique of quantitative, qualitative, and theoretical research (Bezrukova et al., 2012; Posthuma et al., 2002). This methodology produced over 300 books, journal articles, magazine articles, and discussion papers. In this review, the authors chose to focus only on those peer-reviewed papers reporting empirical findings or developing theoretical arguments surrounding devolvement.

While the studies reviewed herein are admirable and help call attention to an important topic in HRM, they nonetheless fail to provide a comprehensive understanding of contingencies affecting devolvement as they do not consider the multi-level nature of the phenomenon. Therefore, the authors’ contribution lies in the identification and categorization of contingency factors affecting the occurrence of devolvement operating at the individual, HRM team, and organizational levels.

As devolvement continues to be a viable means for assigning HR responsibilities from the human resources department to managers, its effects can have an impact on organizational performance, the strategic positioning of HR, and various job attitudes of line managers. Therefore, a clearer picture of devolvement in order to understand its continued significance is an important contribution.

The immigrant entrepreneurship literature indicates that immigrant entrepreneurs reap numerous benefits from their co-ethnic communities℉ social capital. These benefits, however, often come at a price because scholars note the potential for this community social capital to impose limitations on the entrepreneurs. While the literature largely focuses on the benefits of social capital, there is no research on what motivates the immigrant entrepreneurs to engage with their co-ethnic community in terms of contributing to, and utilizing, their co-ethnic communities℉ social capital, and the consequences these may have on their enterprises. Addressing this gap in the literature is important in the development of successful immigrant enterprises. Thus, based on a model posited by Portes and Sensenbrenner (1993), we suggest that immigrant entrepreneurs℉ motivations will influence their use of, and contributions to, co-ethnic community social capital, impacting, in turn, business success. We contribute to both the immigrant entrepreneurship and social capital research through exploring how entrepreneurs℉ motives, with respect to their co-ethnic communities℉ social capital, influence business success.

Presents a theoretical approach to understanding the local culture of firms in the multinational information sector. Called situating culture, this approach holds that cultural understanding is locally situated, behavioral and embedded in everyday, socially negotiated work practices. The application of this theory is provided through cases from the workplace cultures of US multinational IT firms operating in Ireland. These examples show how the local culture of a global IT firm represents the interaction of industry, corporate and national contexts. It results in locally situated work practices and distinct socially negotiated realities that ultimately impact behavior in these settings. The theoretical approach of situating culture contributes to a better understanding of contextualism in the cross‐cultural IT environment. This understanding, in turn, has implications for future cross‐cultural IS research as well as for cross‐cultural IT practice.

Studies of multi-sector collaborations have increased in recent years. However, the topic is still complex and lacks synthesis. Toward that end, the purpose of this paper is to investigate how collaboration is addressed in the public administration and nonprofit sector journals, and applies well-established strategic decision-making theories to shed light on possible research directions that would provide rigor to the field of collaboration.

The authors conduct a literature review of the top nonprofit and public administration journals, believing these most likely to contain articles on the topic of multi-sector collaboration.

The authors identify a number of themes, including need for clarity, temporality, call to collaborate, funding, partnering issues and processes, benefits of collaboration across three different collaborative types.

The authors embed well-known strategic decision-making theories into the themes emergent from this review and offer suggestions as to how future researchers may test strategic decision-making processes within multi-sector collaborations.

The social capital used to access ethnic community resources is widely recognized in the literature as being important for immigrant entrepreneurship. However, there is limited knowledge regarding the extent to which immigrant entrepreneurs' agency, specifically their motivations, influence their use of, and contributions to, their ethnic social capital. In this paper, the authors explore this relationship.

Based on a qualitative approach, this research utilizes semi-structured interviews and thematic analysis to identify the motivations, sources and effects of ethnic social capital.

This research indicates that immigrant entrepreneurs have mixed motives when engaging with their ethnic communities. The findings suggest that the immigrant entrepreneurs' social capital–mediated interactions within their ethnic community are driven not only by the social structure but that their agency, specifically their motivations, play an important role in them. While entrepreneurs hold mixed motives, they recognize the importance of business success. Thus, they make concessions to their ethnic community and utilize its resources if doing so benefits their business.

This research explores the role that immigrant entrepreneurs' motivations play in how they use and contribute to immigrant community social capital. By doing so, this study brings agency to the forefront of the discussion on immigrant entrepreneurship and social capital.

This study provides insight into the connection between the extent to which immigrant entrepreneurs utilize and contribute to their ethnic community's social capital, their motivations for doing so and the effect that these factors have on the businesses as well as their ethnic communities. This understanding might be useful for organizations seeking to foster immigrant entrepreneurship as well as for entrepreneurs themselves.

Individuals' motivations as they relate to social capital involve a variable that is rarely, if ever, considered – that is, individual agency. Thus, this research contributes this perspective to the immigrant entrepreneurship literature but also more broadly to the social capital and entrepreneurship fields. This research can be extended to understand the impact of entrepreneurs' motivations on the communities in which they are embedded.

Using survey data of nonprofit board members from racial/ethnic minority groups, the purpose of this paper is to investigate how the three work group perspectives toward diversity theorized by Ely and Thomas (2001) – discrimination-and-fairness (P1), access-and-legitimacy (P2), and integration-and-learning (P3) – are associated with minority group members’ inclusion experiences.

The paper investigates how an organization's motivations for board diversity, as perceived by racial/ethnic minority board members, drive various organizational- and board-level practices and behaviors, and ultimately impact their experience of inclusion. The paper uses two different operationalizations of the diversity perspectives to assess their impact on minority board members’ inclusion experiences. The hypothesized model was tested using partial least squares analyses on the responses of 403 racial/ethnic minority nonprofit board members.

Regardless of the measure used, racial/ethnic minority board members experienced increased feelings of inclusion as the perceived operating perspective for board diversity changed from P1 to P2 to P3, while concurrently the mediating factors influencing inclusion experiences changed in significance. Findings support the importance of the integration-and-learning perspective for the experience of inclusion by racial/ethnic minority board members.

Findings indicate that organizations that employ an integration-and-learning approach to diversity and focus on encouraging their majority group members to engage in inclusive behaviors, rather than on policies and procedures, will engender the racial/ethnic minorities’ experience of inclusion.

The paper quantitatively investigated how three organizational diversity paradigms are associated with the individual inclusion experiences of minority nonprofit board members.