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In recent years, theory and research have been increasingly devoted to understanding organizational behavior in cross-cultural and global contexts, with particular attention being paid to the appropriateness of various human resources management (HRM) practices because practices that may be effective within one cultural context may not be effective in other cultural contexts. This chapter argues that a multi-level perspective is needed to explain the interplay between HRM practices and employee responses across cultural contexts. Specifically, the multi-level framework developed in this chapter elucidates the importance of fit between HRM practices, individual values, organizational values, and societal values. Societal values play a key role in the adoption of HRM practices, and the effectiveness of these HRM practices will depend largely on “fit” or alignment with the values of the societal culture in which the organization is operating. HRM practices also shape the collective responses of employees through organizational climate at the organizational level and through psychological climate at the individual level. For positive employee attitudes and responses to emerge, the climate created by the HRM practices must be aligned with societal and individual values. Building on these notions, the strength of the societal culture in which the organization is operating serves as a mechanism that links relationships between climate, value fit, and attitudes across levels of analysis. The chapter concludes with some recommendations for future research and implications for practice.

Prior research suggests that cultural values affect individuals’ preferences in whether work rewards (i.e. pay and benefits) are allocated according to rules based on equity, equality, or need. However, this research has focussed primarily on societal-level values or individual-level operationalizations of values originally conceptualized at the societal level. Drawing on equity and social exchange theories, the purpose of this paper is to present a theoretical model and nine propositions that incorporate both individual and societal values as determinants of these reward allocation rule preferences.

The author briefly reviews of the relevant literature on values and reward allocation preferences and present arguments supported by prior research, leading to a model and nine propositions.

The author proposes that societal values and individual values have main and interactive effects on reward allocation preferences and that the effects of societal values are partially mediated by individual values.

The model and propositions present relationships that could be tested in future multi-level studies. Future conceptual/theoretical work may also build on the model presented in this paper.

The proposed relationships, if supported, would have important implications for organizational reward systems and staffing.

Prior research on reward allocation preferences focusses mostly on the effects of societal or individual values. This theoretical paper attempts to clarify and distinguish values at these two levels and to better understand their main and interactive effects on individual reward allocation rule preferences.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the association between national societal values and corporate governance in emerging markets.

The sample is comprised of 511 firm-year observations representing firms from 22 emerging markets. The authors regress sample firms’ corporate governance ratings, reported by Credit Lyonnais Securities Asia (CLSA), on national societal value scores (Hofstede, 1980 variables for primary analysis and Schwartz, 1994 variables for sensitivity tests) and firm-level and country-level control variables.

The authors find that national societal values are associated with corporate governance in emerging markets. Corporate governance is strong in firms from individualistic societies, and weak in firms from uncertainty avoiding and masculine cultures.

The authors extend the stream of literature that has established the link between formal institutions and corporate governance. The authors also extend the literature that examines how societal values influence corporate practices in emerging markets.

The results suggest that informal institutions, in addition to formal ones, shape corporate governance in emerging markets. Corporate stakeholders need to be aware of the different societal values of each market and develop specific strategic plans that best suit both formal and informal institutions.

The findings suggest that national societal values need to be considered in cross-country research on corporate governance. The results should also be of interest to policy makers advocating for or against global governance standards.

In this chapter, we propose that society- and organization-level social context cues influence the endorsement of ethical leadership. More specifically, we propose that certain organizational culture values provide proximal contextual cues that people use to form perceptions of the importance of ethical leadership. We further propose that specific societal culture values and societal corruption provide a set of more distal, yet salient, environmental cues about the importance of ethical leadership. Using data from Project GLOBE, we provide evidence that both proximal and distal contextual cues were related to perceptions of four dimensions of ethical leadership as important for effective leadership, including character/integrity, altruism, collective motivation, and encouragement.

In this response, we address the thoughtful commentaries by Chen and Tsui, and Erez and highlight three overarching themes emerging from their contributions. First, we address the challenge of balancing complexity and parsimony in our model of values, HRM practices and fit in cross-cultural contexts. Second, we provide further explanations of the linkages between societal and organizational values. Third, we address the question of whether culture and climate should be treated as separate constructs in the model. In doing so, we hope to stimulate future progress in multi-level and cross-cultural perspectives of HRM and fit.

The purpose of this study is to consider the limitations of traditional finance and to provide an overview of the challenges associated with the developing area of sustainable finance. In the context of multiple global systemic threats to humanity, the author argues that societal values must play a prominent role in calling for comprehensive government policy and activating the fund allocations required to safeguard the stability of multiple societal systems.

This study integrates research results from several disciplines to show that value-based finance is essential for ensuring that information acquisition, government policies and fund allocations support the stability of multiple systems on which society depends. The discussion is informed by research that documents massive uncertainty in planetary and biological processes requiring urgent action.

Traditional finance allows prioritization of financial returns at the expense of environmental and social stability with potentially catastrophic and irreversible consequences. To safeguard the stability of societal systems, fund allocation decisions by individuals and organizations must prioritize societal values, as they relate to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and the science needed to achieve them.

This study provides a novel view of the critical importance of societal values in finance given growing global threats to the stability of multiple, interconnected systems. It offers a unique perspective by drawing on research results from multiple disciplines to highlight an essential role for science-based information related to societal values in the engagement and fund allocation decisions of all market participants operating under extreme uncertainty.

Societal values are emerging as critical variables in providing context relevance to extending international management research. A hallmark of the 1990s was the widespread adoption of market cultures in Asian nations that embraced large‐scale reform and restructuring. These programmes brought about dramatic changes at organisational level, but the links between the societal upheavals of economic transformation and micro level changes have yet to receive sufficient academic attention. For instance, similarity or dissimilarity about held societal values of managerial groups, within an organisation, as identified by gender, age, educational qualification or family upbringing, or even by the size of the company in which they work, requires comprehensive scrutiny if these reform programmes are to succeed. Since 1991 the Indian economy has embraced economic reform to move towards more empowerment for individual organisations in all spheres. The study reported in this paper explores managerial social orientations in the context of micro‐level organisational functioning. The results of this study, with 421 senior Indian managers, demonstrate that in a relatively short time the fundamental attributes of a competitive market economy have subjugated societal qualities reinforced over hundreds of years and thought to be unchangeable.

This paper seeks to explicate the strategic contribution of the corporate communication/ public relations function (PR) to enterprise strategy development at macro‐organisational level with the aim of contributing towards its institutionalisation.

The approach takes the form of a literature review and conceptual analysis, reflective PR paradigm and corporate social performance approach.

Enterprise strategy is the suggested mechanism and a relevant strategy process for incorporating societal and stakeholder expectations, values, norms and standards into the organisation's strategy development processes. Enterprise strategy explicates corporate communication/PR's strategic contribution at the macro‐organisational level. Societal expectations, values, standards and norms are expressed through concepts such as CSR, corporate governance, good corporate citizenship, sustainability, and the Triple Bottom Line; manifest through non‐legislative measures such as the Global Sullivan Principles of CSR, the Global Reporting Initiative, the Social Responsibility Investment Index of the JSE, as well as voluntary codes such as the Cadbury Report (UK) and the King Reports I, II and III in South Africa (SA); and are addressed through legislative measures such as the Sarbanes‐Oxley Act (USA) and the Employment Equity/Broad‐based Black Economic Empowerment/Financial Intelligence Centre Acts (SA).

This article addresses the dearth of literature on enterprise strategy and corporate communication/PR's strategic role at top management level by conceptualising enterprise strategy and explicating corporate communication's strategic contribution within its framework – indicating corporate communication's focus to be on the social (People) and environmental (Planet) pillars of the Triple Bottom Line approach, rather than its financial aspects (Profit).

Aumann and Ostroff proposed a very comprehensive framework that attempts to identify the antecedents, mediators, moderators, and consequences of human resource management (HRM) in cross-cultural contexts. It is an ambitious framework that spans three levels of analysis (society, organization, and individual) with mechanisms of fit occurring at both the macro- and microlevels, focuses on both structure and process, and identifies cross-level interactions. The authors considered organizational and psychological climate as the key integration between culture and employee responses, and in this process inadvertently dismissed the function of organizational culture. We propose an organizational perspective on multi-level cultural integration and discuss its implication for cross-cultural HRM, highlighting the role of organizational culture as the major focus for integration with a host country's societal culture and its local employees’ values. The analysis is enriched by considering the strength of both organizational and societal culture and the cultural distance between the home and host country of the multinational firm. We identify how our approach has both augmented and simplified Aumann and Ostroff's framework to facilitate future research.