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The purpose of this study is to explore what contributes to egalitarian teams and facilitates for team learning in professional service teams.

A qualitative case study, including 41 in-depth interviews (n = 18) of professional service team members and managers in one of Nordics largest professional service companies was conducted.

This study reveals how acknowledgement of generational differences and humour can facilitate egalitarianism and psychological safety for members of professional service teams. This in turn relates to team learning processes and behaviours. Humour creates a “safe space” between team members representing different areas of the novice–expert continuum for idea generation and knowledge sharing.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is one of the first to contribute with insight on experiences and expectations of humour as an enabling mechanism for egalitarianism and team learning in professional service teams. The findings provide professional service firms with valuable and tangible insights, which could serve as a basis for designing learning and training practices.

The present study investigates whether individuals having a fixed digital mindset (comprises fundamental beliefs about technological ability and organizational resources as work becomes more digitalized) experience greater helplessness working in virtual teamwork environments. The authors examine how perceived internal human resource management (HRM) alignment moderates the positive relationship expected between individuals' fixed digital mindset and feelings of helplessness. Together, the paper aims to contribute to a greater understanding of the personal and contextual factors that influence an individual's experience of helplessness in virtual team settings.

The authors test the hypotheses using time-lagged survey data collected from 153 information technology (IT) engineers working in virtual teams in Europe.

The authors find that individuals with higher levels of fixed digital mindset experience greater helplessness in virtual teamwork environments than individuals with lower levels. Furthermore, the authors find that having higher-fixed beliefs about organizational resources is positively related to helplessness when individuals perceive that the broader HRM system is misaligned with the virtual teamwork environment.

The data were obtained from IT engineers in Europe, which is potentially limiting the generalizability of the authors' findings to other work contexts and cultures.

The authors' study helps leaders in virtual teamwork environments to better understand and manage the personal and contextual factors that could affect individuals' well-being and effective functioning in such settings.

The authors' research contributes to the scant literature investigating the personal characteristics important in virtual teamwork environments and the contextual factors important for aligning virtual teamwork designs with the organizational system. The authors extend this research by looking at personal and contextual factors together in a single model.

This paper aims to explore what belonging is through the represented experience of people at work. The aim is to investigate employees’ interpretations of belonging at work and its interrelation with the material, aesthetic and emotional aspects associated to the where, the how and the when workplace is inhabited.

In line with the practice turn in social sciences, this study uses the visual method (snaplogs), which includes pictures and texts.

Belonging is situated in and integrated with social interactions, materiality, emotions and aesthetics. Belonging is about being part of something, the process of becoming through constant mediation between material aspects and social components, the process of experiencing boundaries and the attempt to perform, engage and participate (and find spaces for shared practices) in a workplace. Together, they constitute the situatedness, the here and now, of experiences of belonging and the perceived interpretation of being one among equals across organizational boundaries.

Data were only collected at one point in time. The authors also relied on their own interpretations of pictures and texts and did not involve the informants in the analysis.

Being, becoming and belonging comprise material, social and affective dimensions. These dimensions should be addressed for employees to belong at work.

This study contributes to the belonging literature on perceived interpretations of what belonging is at work. The paper is also original in terms of the visual method used to grasp the practice representation of belonging experiences.

The purpose of this study is to investigate inclusion, perceived opportunities and discrimination between men and women, across career levels, in a professional service firm in Norway.

A cross-sectional design with a survey was used. Employees across six different career levels in a large Norwegian professional service firm responded, resulting in a sample size of 912.

Men report higher levels of inclusion and more opportunities and less discrimination in the work place than women do. Patterns of differences between men and women vary across career levels. At early mid-career, men and women have the largest differences in opportunities and inclusion experiences.

A limitation with this study is the cross-sectional design and data collected from one company. This could limit the generalizability of the findings. Future research should include longitudinal designs. The empirical data demonstrate that men and women continue to have dissimilar experiences in the professional services, with women facing more career obstacles than men.

Organizations can implement policies that foster inclusive environments and ensure career equality by providing development opportunities for both men and women. It is important that professional service firms recognize that at different career levels, perceptions of inclusiveness can vary.

This study provides empirical evidence that women continue to face different types of treatment in professional service firms, and offers suggestions for addressing these inequalities by introducing the concept of inclusiveness.

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 the study is to empirically investigate the similarities and differences between dyads and four‐party groups in an integrative negotiation.

Data are collected in a between subjects experiment. A total of 182 participants completed a negotiation role play and questionnaire. Hypotheses are tested using t‐tests, MANOVAs and two multiple regression analyses.

Results demonstrate that dyads do outperform groups on both the economic and subjective measures of outcomes. Sharing of priority information and the fixed pie bias was higher in groups than in dyads. For dyads the procedure used (considering more than one issue at a time) led to higher economic outcomes, and both procedure and problem solving were important for subjective outcomes. For four‐party negotiations, problem solving was significantly related to higher outcomes, on both economic and subjective outcomes, and procedure was moderately related to economic outcomes. Problem solving was significantly more important for the groups than for dyads on economic outcomes.

The controlled experimental setting could limit the generalizabiltiy of the findings. Measures of the intermediate variables could be improved by including additional items and observations. Future research is required in field settings using multiple measures of the process.

In multiparty negotiation information sharing and the presence of cognitive biases may not be as important as focusing on a problem solving approach.

An empirical investigation that groups under‐perform dyads in an integrative negotiation has not been conducted before.

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.

This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

This research paper concentrates on how organizationally ingrained career inequality obstructs the ability of women to gain equal pay and career-development opportunities compared to their male counterparts in a Norwegian professional service firm. The surveyed males at the firm reported experiencing greater inclusion and development opportunities than the surveyed females, while perceived gender discrimination was much higher among women. Crucially, the results also vary across seniority levels.

This briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.