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With U.S. health care costs increasing at three times the rate of inflation and Americans spending 50 percent more on health care than any other nation, health care practitioners will most certainly continue to focus upon cost containment and budgets (Guthrie, 1991). However, as suggested by some experts (e.g. Lytle and Mokwa, 1992), managerial approaches preoccupied with containing costs and financial budgeting are no longer sufficient for success, or maybe even survival, in today's intensely competitive marketplace. The major transformations in structure that have taken place in the health care industry throughout the 1980s call for more proactive and strategic approaches to planning and managing if health care organizations are to be successful in today's highly competitive environment.

Develops and presents Importance‐Satisfaction Analysis as a simple and highly pragmatic organizational diagnostic tool for both managers and consultants. Specifically, the importance‐performance framework presented in the marketing literature has been adapted for application in the management of human resource by changing the model′s external/strategic (the consumer and the product) orientation to an internal/operational (the employee and the job) focus. Uses data from a major national laboratory to illustrate step‐by‐step application of this methodology. Discusses practical advantages of the framework and implications for managers and consultants. Simplicity and ease of application, adaptability to various data collection techniques (questionnaires, interviews, group analysis, etc.), early identification of areas requiring action, priority‐based resource allocation implications, and modest cost are a few of the virtues of this managerial/consulting tool.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between cultural distance and cross‐cultural adjustment. The authors address four hypotheses regarding this relationship: the Cultural Distance Hypothesis; the Cultural Distance Paradox; the Null Hypothesis; and the Asymmetry Hypothesis, in an effort to reconcile the disparities found in the literature. Specifically, portions of the extant literature support a positive relationship, while others support the opposite. There is also some evidence that this relationship may vary depending on the direction of expatriate transfer. Finally, some of the research has failed to support any significant relationship between cultural distance and adjustment.

Survey data were collected from 125 expatriates (117 expatriates and eight repatriates), representing 36 nationalities and on assignment in 32 different countries. Multiple regression analyses were used to regress cultural distance on both general and work‐related adjustment. Cultural distance was first operationalized as a composite of the scores on Hofstede's cultural dimensions. Subsequently, distances for each of the dimensions were entered into the regression models.

The authors concur with the Cultural Distance Paradox that greater differences in individualism between home and host cultures facilitates work adjustment. Findings also support the Asymmetry Hypothesis that travel from individualistic societies to more collectivist ones results in greater adjustment than does travel in the opposite direction.

Based on the Cultural Distance Paradox, firms may be well‐advised to direct their expatriate training efforts toward those assignments where the home and host cultures are presumably similar, as there may be a tendency to take adjustment for granted and therefore forgo cross‐cultural training. Similar efforts should be made to ease transfers to locations where the culture is more individualistic than that of the parent country.

Rather than fixate on one set of findings from the literature, this study considers all four of the possible relationships between cultural distance and adjustment, as found or suggested in previous research. This comprehensive approach should advance our understanding of cultural distance as a complex construct, with a role that cannot be consistently defined across all situations. This represents a departure from the need to assign static roles to variables that may be dynamic in nature.

This paper aims to assess the relationship between expatriate personality and effectiveness on overseas assignments.

Survey data were collected from 118 expatriates who were currently on assignments overseas or had been on an assignment in the past.

Results of multiple regression analysis show expatriate personality traits to be significant predictors of two of the effectiveness measured used. Extraversion, emotional stability, and openness have a significant, positive impact on expatriate adjustment, and agreeableness is significant and positively associate with expatriate job performance.

Organizations may be well‐served to consider expatriate personality as an important criterion for selection for overseas assignments, as successful assignments reflect on the organization in a number of ways and thus contribute to the company's global competitiveness.

Extant research on the connection between expatriate personality and effectiveness has been limited, relies on expatriate or supervisor perceptions of which traits they believe are important to success, and has been inconsistent in measuring the effectiveness construct. This paper directly assesses personality and employs multiple dimensions of effectiveness, thus contributing to the understanding of this relationship.

The classic case for competitiveness as a force driving change was made by Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species by Natural Selection (1859). Adaptation, the ability to react successfully to a changed environment, accounts for multiplicity in the world of nature. Long billed birds are better able to dip beneath the surface of shallow lagoons for their food; the sharp, hard, short beaks of certain finches allow them to crack nuts and seeds. Darwin's reading of nature, so immediately popular and at the same time so controversial, fit well within the goals of nineteenth‐century scientific thought. Tracing the causes of change to fixed, logical patterns allowed scientists to remove non‐objective elements from their equations for evolution. Such issues as value, valor, or virtue held no place in a system of analysis unless they had survival value.