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This study investigates one aspect of the multi‐source feedback process: the agreement between self‐ratings and coworker ratings of workplace behavior. Moderators of rating agreement (i.e., number of years that the coworker had known the employee, trustworthiness of the employee, and country status) are carefully examined. Eighty‐six Russian employee‐coworker dyads, 99 Polish dyads, and 95 U.S. dyads from more than 225 organizations participated. Regression results indicate that rating agreement was higher when the Polish and U.S. coworker knew the target employee a shorter period of time and when the Polish, Russian, and U.S. target employee was considered trustworthy.

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between an employee's trust of coworkers and that employee's enterprising behavior. The extent to which cultural dimensions, in‐group collectivism and power distance, moderate the trust‐behavior relationship is considered.

A rigorous research methodology was employed to minimize potential problems with common method variance. Trust ratings were provided by 135 US, 203 Turkish, 100 Polish, and 86 Russian focal employees. Their 524 coworkers provided enterprising behavior ratings for these focal employees.

The results show that both cognitive‐ and affect‐based trusts of coworkers is associated with enterprising behavior. The findings also indicate that the affect‐based trust/enterprising behavior relationship is stronger in higher power distance cultures than in lower power distance cultures. In‐group collectivism, however, does not moderate the trust enterprising behavior relationships.

Trust is thought to nurture enterprising behavior in the workplace. This study looks at the relationship between trust of coworkers and enterprising behavior, an under investigated but key behavior in the modern organization. The moderating role of power distance implies that organizational interventions promoting affect‐based trust in coworker relationships may have bigger payoffs as far as behavior change in the high‐power distance context than in the low.

This study examines the relationship of a supervisor's affect‐based trust and cognition‐based trust to a subordinate employee's self‐ratings of enterprising behavior, which includes creativity, risk taking, initiative, motivation, and assertiveness, and to the supervisor's and coworker's ratings of the subordinate's enterprising behavior. The extent to which the power distance and in‐group collectivism cultural variables moderate the relationship between affect‐based trust and enterprising behavior is assessed.

Survey responses of US, Turkish, Polish, and Russian supervisor‐subordinate‐coworker triads were collected in a number of firms. Regression results were employed to test the research hypotheses.

The findings of this study show that the supervisor's cognition‐based trust and affect‐based trust of the employee are associated with that employee's enterprising behavior. Significant two‐way interactions indicate that the relationship between affect‐based trust and enterprising behavior is stronger in the three collectivist countries than in the individualist USA. The moderating effects of power distance, on the other hand, appear to be negligible.

The main implication of this study's results is that human relations theories, which are based on the supervisor's top‐down trust of the subordinate employee, may be more effective in collectivist cultures than in individualist cultures.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an understanding of the influence of political goals and behaviour on the outsourcing decision process and outcomes.

The research used an exploratory longitudinal case-based approach. Eight outsourcing projects in three telecommunications companies were analysed from the initial decision to the outcome of the case.

The authors show how political goals and behaviours influence the outsourcing decision process and inductively develop four political goals: personal reputation, attainment, elimination and control. The authors also identify three dynamic outsourcing paths: the personal reputation path, which leads to successful outcomes; the short-term attain and eliminate path leading to unsuccessful outcomes; and the destabilised path, which leads to mixed outcomes. All of these can be tested in other empirical settings.

The implications for outsourcing literature are that political intentions influence the decision process and outcomes. For theorists, the authors provide an understanding of how political and rational goals and behaviour interact to impact outsourcing outcomes: with political and rational goals and behaviour complementary in some instances. The limitations are that with a small sample the findings are generalisable to theoretical propositions rather than to a population.

The implications for managers are the ability to identify and manage political goals that influence outsourcing decision process and outcomes.

For the first time, the authors uncover the political goals that impact the outsourcing decision process and outcomes. The authors add to the outsourcing literature, transaction cost theory and resource-based theory by defining and understanding the political goals that complement these theories.

This paper aims to model and estimate how celebrity chief executive officers (CEOs) credibility (i.e. expertise, trustworthiness, attractiveness) is related to their brand image (i.e. functional, sensory/visual). This paper further examines the effects of consumer materialism on both celebrity CEOs’ credibility and the image of their brand.

A total of 260 participants knowledgeable of CEOs and their corresponding brands completed an online questionnaire in a cross-sectional study. The data were analyzed through covariance-based structural equation modeling.

Celebrity CEOs’ expertise and attractiveness are positively related to both functional and sensory/visual images of their brands. Results also demonstrate the positive effect of materialism on both celebrity CEOs’ credibility and brand image.

The research was conducted in one country (France) using a cross-sectional design. Additional studies in other settings or countries should be carried out to establish the generalizability of results and strengthen causality inferences.

CEOs need to understand and manage their key role as celebrities, given the direct influence they may have on consumer brand perceptions and behavior.

This study refines the relationship between celebrity CEOs’ credibility and brand image. It is the first to introduce and validate the effect of consumer materialism on the perception of celebrity CEOs.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the moderator role of hierarchical distance (HD) in the relationship between human resources management (HRM) practices and organizational performance (OP, perceived/financial). To date there is no empirical evidence that demonstrates whether HD affects this relationship.

These relationships are examined through an empirical study of 102 small- and medium-sized enterprises from Europe (Spain). Partial least squares structural equation modeling is used to test the moderator effect of HD.

The results show that HD is a cultural dimension which moderates the relationship between HRM practices and OP. Furthermore, when OP is studied in relation to HRM practices, the use of perceived measures are considered more appropriate as these indicate the opinion of employees and managers regarding about OP.

The non-cross-sectional character of the paper.

Organizations should consider HD when deciding the structure and application of their HR practices, since a lesser HD has positive effects on business results.

Little attention has been paid to non-linear models, with particular reference to the inclusion of cultural dimensions – such organizational culture (i.e. HD) – in HRM models.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the impact of social and economic exchange relationships on organizational commitment in line with the mediation effect of organizational trust.

In order to test the hypotheses of the study, a survey was conducted on a sample of 213 employees who were working at manufacturing companies in Turkey.

The findings of the study reveal that both dimensions of the exchange relationship positively affect organizational commitment and these links are mediated by organizational trust.

The study provides reliable scales to measure the social and economic exchange relationship between employees and employing organizations. Although the sample of the study was relatively small and drawn from a single country, the Cronbach’s α values of scales were obtained above the recommended threshold value.

Organizational leaders might adopt an exchange perspective to build a trustworthy relationship with their employees. Developing such a mindset is very important at an employment structure, which has become highly flexible and contingent during the last decades.

The study attempts to distinguish the twofold nature of the exchange relationship in organizations based on a theoretical model to reveal the impact of each dimension on organizational level outcomes in conjunction with the mediating role of trust. In doing so, the study contributes to the literature by incorporating social and economic exchange in a holistic view as well as defining each dimension in a broader sense by including some employee-related challenges of business organizations such as diversity, social responsibility, leadership, ethical culture and so on.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between workplace learning and organizational commitment with the mediating role of cross-cultural adjustment and the moderating role of supervisor trust for the case of foreign workers in a new cultural setting.

This study uses structural equation modeling to analyze a sample data of 367 Vietnamese and Philippine workers in Taiwan.

Results show that workplace learning enhances foreign workers' organizational commitment. Cross-cultural adjustment is found to have a mediating effect in the link between workplace learning and organizational commitment. Furthermore, supervisor trust moderates the link between cross-cultural adjustment and organizational commitment. In addition, supervisor trust moderates the indirect effect of workplace learning on organizational commitment through cross-cultural adjustment.

Prior literature often focuses on expatriates who are high-skilled employees. This study investigates low-skilled workers who come from less-developed country working in a more developed economy. This study is one of the first researches examining the issue of foreign workers' commitment in new cultural environment. Our findings shed a new light to the effect of workplace learning on organizational commitment. Our findings also help to clarify the roles of cross-cultural adjustment and supervisor trust into the workplace learning–organizational commitment relationship. This study provides implications for researchers and managers regarding to management and development of foreign workers for local organizations.

Interest in creating high performance organizations (HPOs) has been growing in the Middle East and Middle Eastern managers have been looking into practices that will help them elevate organizational performance. Unfortunately there is a shortage of HPO studies conducted in the Middle East which could help these managers. The purpose of this paper is to examine the applicability of the recently developed HPO Framework in a Middle Eastern context, namely at Palestine Polytechnic University (PPU). The goal of the study was to evaluate whether this framework could be applied in the Middle Eastern context and thus help improve performance of Middle Eastern organizations.

A workshop was conducted with management and staff of the university at PPU's premises in Hebron. During the workshop, management, staff and teachers filled in the HPO questionnaire, which gauges the current HPO status of an organization. The resulting HPO score of PPU, and the comparison with the scores of other Middle‐Eastern organizations in the database of the researchers, were discussed during a workshop with representatives of PPU and initial improvements were established and put down in an action plan.

With an average HPO score of 6.8, PPU was an average scoring organization that performed more or less the same as the other Middle‐East organizations. However, two main issues for PPU emerged that had to be addressed in order to transform the university in an HPO. The first issue was that PPU's performance management process had to be improved, as not everything that mattered to PPU's performance was communicated to everybody adequately enough. The second issue was that the performance‐driven behavior of PPU's people had to be strengthened, as the decision‐making and action‐taking processes took too long and people were nor resilient and flexible enough to deal quickly with changing conditions.

Practically, the research findings could help managers of Middle Eastern organizations to achieve sustainable high performance in their organizations.

The research described in this paper constitutes one of the first studies into the determining factors of sustainable high performance in the Middle East and as such, it adds to the strategic management literature by showing that the HPO concept can be applied in the Middle East to evaluate the high performance status of Middle Eastern organizations.

Early in 2008, Tony Truesdale, President of the Vitamin Shoppe, was preparing for a meeting with the company's investment bankers. In particular, he was wrestling with supply chain issues that were becoming increasingly pronounced in light of the company's aggressive growth plan. Truesdale recognized that it was nearly impossible to effectively manage the company's large and fragmented supply base, resulting in higher than necessary costs and lower than desired performance. The company also relied too heavily on one supplier for a significant amount of the company's volume. Truesdale recognized that it was nearly impossible to effectively manage the company's large and fragmented supply base, resulting in higher than necessary costs and lower than desired performance. The company also relied too heavily on one supplier for a significant amount of the company's volume.

Further, in the company's single distribution center, 95 percent of the available storage capacity was utilized throughout most of 2007; well above what was considered optimal. The lack of space was driving excessive product handling and increasing operating expenses. The company's inbound and outbound transportation strategies also contributed to inefficiencies and unnecessary costs. Operating efficiencies could be achieved if all transportation needs were brought together under one strategic umbrella. Truesdale was certain that in order to reach the company's growth targets and maintain its competitive advantage, addressing these supply chain issues was critical. Students are asked to describe the specific issues affecting supply chain performance and recommend approaches to solving the problems