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To develop more sensitivity for different patterns of human resource management in multinational companies.

Systemic approach; the concepts and models are based on the evaluation of consulting projects in the field of human resource management.

A concept of four typical varieties of human resource management, a model and important aspects for designing the cooperation processes between human resource departments and company management in multinational companies.

This paper provides a complex mindset about human resource management in a multinational context, which is a prerequisite for designing constructive cooperation processes between human resource departments and company management and for increasing the effectiveness of human resource activities.

A theoretical model, which describes continuous improvement and benchmarking processes, was developed. The model was based on the concepts that improvements in management inputs should produce organizational benefits and that management inputs are limited by budget constraints. The model was developed using health and safety as an example of operational management issues. In this example, organizational benefits related to reductions in the number and costs of accidents and management inputs referred to the provision and costs of accident prevention control measures. The utility of the model was demonstrated with five health and safety scenarios, which tested the model against the continuous improvement philosophy and benchmarking with respect to reducing costs, improving performance, minimising organizational change and assessing performance within different work environments.

More and more foreign companies, including multinational companies, open business in China. The staff management under the local culture of China is one of the critical points affecting the success of foreign invested companies in China. This paper aims to illustrate the effective methods of staff management for foreign invested companies in China.

For this purpose, a survey on concrete practices of staff management was conducted among three multinational company affiliates in China, whose parent companies are located in the USA, Japan, and Europe, respectively, by the in‐depth interviews with the high‐level executives of the affiliates.

It was found that although the staff management experiences of the surveyed affiliates show differences in operation, the affiliates have a common sense on how to balance culture difference, how to effectively communicate with staff, and how to appraise the performance. The active and passive factors of these experiences were further analysed from the needs level under current Chinese economic situation and from the invisible impacts on human behaviour of Chinese culture.

This study surveyed only three multinational company affiliates in China and therefore, the understanding obtained is limited in scope. The comprehensive knowledge of the subject depends on more case studies.

The analysis reveals that the active factors and localization, especially localization of the management team, are very important to the staff management of foreign invested companies in China.

The paper contributes to the research on effective methods for staff management in multinational companies.

As China is transforming from a planned economy a market‐oriented economy, private enterprise plays a prominent role in China's economy today. This paper introduces the status of private enterprise and focuses on its records management. By explaining the changes in China's policy towards the private sector, it deals mainly with practice in both archive administration and the records management of private companies. Government archives administration changed along with national policy from serving only the public sector to serving both public and private sectors evenly. For the private sector, archival consciousness is the key element in its fledging stage of records management. The paper also analyzes the characteristics of private companies that are different from state‐owned ones and the advantages and disadvantages of records management, and predicts some aspects of its development.

The purpose of this study is to explore if and how companies strive for a harmonization of management accounting systems in their international business units to support company-wide consistent strategy implementation and to analyze the underlying drivers and pitfalls. Our paper is motivated by the tension between the need for consistent strategy implementation in the different international business units of multinational companies and the traditional differences in management accounting practices across countries.

The field study comprised semi-structured in-depth interviews with management accounting experts in selected German and Spanish business units of 15 major German multinational companies.

The authors identified strong efforts for company-wide harmonization of management accounting practices and found that beside explicit initiatives set by corporate headquarters, more implicit pressures such as the education of management accountants, the work of global consultancies and the use of standardized ERP-systems constitute strong drivers of the identified harmonization.

The findings highlight implicit pressures as important drivers of the harmonization of management accounting systems in the international business units of multinational companies. Taking these implicit pressures into consideration can help multinational companies striving for a harmonization of business unit management accounting for consistent strategy implementation.

Building on a unique sample of pairs of German and Spanish business units of 15 major German companies, the field study explores harmonization practices and its drivers in multinational companies.

This article describes a study of the workers in two heavy engineering plants, in the Glasgow area, one belonging to a British company of a traditional type, the other to an American company. A comparison was made of the perceptions and expectations that the workforces held of their respective managements and the attitudes they held towards them.

The survival of an organisation today depends directly on its capacity to be efficient and competitive. Growing transformations in the world economy impose new variables on the productive process. Environmental management is one of these variants, which brings in itself a series of opportunities and risks. An environmental management system (EMS) allows an organisation to permanently control the effects of the productive process on the environment. In Brazil, the adoption of this new approach still finds certain resistance by companies, which have seen it more as an additional cost than an improvement opportunity. This study aims to identify the environmental actions of some Brazilian companies, seeking to obtain important information about the process and the operations accomplished in the adoption of EMS by companies which seek to improve the quality of life for the population.

The main purpose of this study is to investigate the current usage of computers in Singapore’s property management companies. The findings confirm a paradox that in Singapore’s property management companies, computer applications are lagging behind the advancement of computer hardware and software. Three reasons may explain the paradox. First, property management companies are dealing with a small portion of properties in Singapore where public housing estates dominate the property stock. Second, property management involves many personal touches in which computers are not helpful. Third, software packages developed in other parts of the world may not suit the need of property management tasks in Singapore.

In this paper we compare the quality management practices and quality results between Taiwanese manufacturing and service companies, based on a survey of 131 manufacturing and 109 service companies. The results presented here are focused on eight critical factors of quality management ‐ quality leadership, strategic quality planning, quality information and analysis, human resources management, quality assurance, supplier quality, customer orientation, quality citizenship ‐ and company quality results. The present study shows significant differences between manufacturing and service companies with manufacturing companies performing better in six critical dimensions of quality management as well as in quality results. Opportunities for improving quality management practices in Taiwanese service companies are identified.

The purpose of this chapter is to provide a comprehensive review of empirical research on performance management (PM) in former communist Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries, to evaluate the state of knowledge in this area and suggest possible directions for future research.

An examination of the literature was undertaken to review the empirical studies treating on PM in ex-communist countries from CEE. A total of 96 journal articles, PhD thesis, and conference papers were identified, categorized, and analyzed according to research questions, methodology, and theoretical framework. Contributions are classified by countries, according to progress in transition process (post-transition/transition countries) and membership in the Soviet Union (Soviet/non-Soviet countries). The review examines publications in four languages (English, French, Romanian, and Russian).

The literature review identified various stages of development of PM research and practice in the different groups of CEE countries.

In post-transition CEE countries, PM research follows the trends settled up in the developed countries (quantitative studies examining the extent of usage of different PM tools, influence of contingent factors, relationship PM-strategy, and impact on company’s performance). Also, the findings illustrate the modernization of PM practices: increasing importance of nonfinancial indicators and integrated performance management systems (PMS), although financial indicators are prevailing.

On the contrary, in transition countries PM research and practices are at an early stage, the reviewed literature highlights some specific issues related to transition context: the dynamic aspect of PM, change management, importance of informal systems, cultural aspects, and business traditions.

Because of the large number of CEE countries and the diversity of their national languages, many studies conducted in native languages have not been addressed in this literature review, which is essentially based on publications in English and French. Only for three CEE countries (Russia, Romania, and Moldova) publications in national language were considered.

This literature review may be useful for practitioners, providing insights on the extent of diffusion and usage of different PM tools and identifying difficulties and pitfalls to avoid in their implementation.

The chapter represents one of the first contributions to the knowledge about PM research and practice in former communist CEE countries. The adopted framework for reviewing and classifying the literature allows identifying the differences in PM research and practices between post-transition/transition and Soviet/non-Soviet countries.