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The purpose of this paper is to investigate diversity attitudes of business school students across three national contexts Norway; India and the Czech Republic. These three countries are dissimilar from one another in terms of values, such as individualism and collectivism (Hofstede, 2001) self-expression and secular-rationalism (Inglehart and Welzel, 2010) and inequality. The authors wanted to explore similarities and differences in diversity attitudes of respondents from these countries.

Using the diversity attitude scale developed by De Meuse and Hostager (2001) the authors conducted comparative research and collected data from 234 business school graduate students.

The authors found that all groups were positive towards diversity, however, there were significant differences in diversity attitudes between the countries. The Czech Republic had the most positive diversity scores and India the least positive.

This study used convenient samples of business students which might not be representative of the future management in these countries. However, the findings do suggest that attitudes towards diversity are generally positive across these very different national contexts.

The findings suggest that in today’s international context people are becoming more positive towards diversity – at least on the conceptual level and a bottom up approach from MNC to diversity management might be easier to implement than previously thought. The preliminary evidence from the study suggests that this first step of introducing diversity policies across national borders might not meet as much resistance as previously anticipated.

The movement towards seeing and accepting different others is moving in the right direction.

To use this established diversity attitudes measure across three very different national cultures. In the literature there is a call for more comparative research on diversity management.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate perceptions of fairness of a standardized performance appraisal in a multinational enterprise. The paper looks at the first step in understanding fairness perceptions by examining whether national culture influences the view on standardization itself and by comparing China, Lithuania, and Norway.

An experiment using a scenario that outlined a performance appraisal tool in a multinational company is conducted. National culture and individual cultural values are the independent variables and the perception of fairness of the practice is the dependent variable. A sample of 80 management respondents from Lithuania, China, and Norway is taken.

The findings suggest that national culture influences perceptions of fairness of a standardized performance appraisal tool. Employees from countries undergoing profound economic and political change, that score low on the cultural dimension of self‐expression, tend to see the standardized tool as more fair than employees from a stable country high on self‐expression. Differences in fairness perception at the individual level are found, where respondents high on power distance had higher perceptions of fairness of a standardized tool. Both national and individual levels measures of culture affected perceptions.

The sample is small; however, the differences are strong and indicate that perceptions of fairness vary. The experimental design allows good control, although it can limit generalizability to the field.

Multinational companies must understand that before analysis and choice of specific human resource practices it is important that they are aware of national and individual cultural differences towards standardization itself. Cultural differences affect reactions not only to the specific human practice but also to the standardization. Companies can use dimensions such as power distance and the survival/self‐expression dimension to understand the response of their employees. Being aware of this challenge may lead multinationals to pursue more fine‐tuned ways of communicating and implementing a standardized practice.

Using experiments to understand the implementation of practices in multinational organizations it is identified that, before deciding whether a practice should be locally adapted or standardized, the first step is to find out how standardization itself is perceived.