Miriam Erez - Böcker

The process of globalization has brought into focus the central role of culture in understanding work behavior. In parallel to the accelerating process of globalization, there has been an explosion of empirical studies on culture and organizational behavior. The Oxford Handbook of Cross-Cultural Organizational Behavior integrates this research into one coherent framework with a rich collection of chapters that highlight the role of culture at the multi-levels of the organization, from the individual level to the meso-level of the social group, the macro-level of the organization, and up to the global work culture.Written by a diverse group of experts in the field, this handbook provides critical knowledge on how cultures vary, and how culture influences basic psychological processes, communication, trust, social networks, leadership, and negotiation. It also covers how to manage multicultural teams, culture and human resource management practices, joint ventures, organizational change, and more. In order to be effective in the emerging global economy, managers need to be able to interact effectively across cultures, and this handbook provides the most comprehensive treatment of the subject on the market.

The focus of this book is the development and application of a middle-range theory of culture, self-identity and work behaviour. According to the authors' self-representative theory, three components are relevant to an individual's work behaviour: cultural and situational characteristics, cognitive representation of the self, and managerial practices and techniques used in an organization. Culture is viewed as a shared knowledge structure that results in decreased variability in individual interpretation of stimuli. The self is viewed as a dynamic interpretive structure that shapes an individual's interpretation of social milieu. Managerial practices influence work behaviour, and in this book the focus is on how these practices relate to the components of culture and the self. A final chapter provides a number of specific recommendations for how organizations might consider structuring their environment and managerial practices in order to match culture-self interaction.

With the passage of NAFTA and GATT, the steady integration of the European Community, and the emergence of promising new markets in Eastern Europe and the Pacific Rim, businesses around the world are globalizing their operations with unprecedented speed. But as executives working in foreign countries have discovered, organizational cultures can differ dramatically from country to country, and management practices effective back home can fail miserably abroad. The Transplanted Executive provides a comprehensive resource for managers of any nationality striving to understand the diversity of workplace values and traditions - and how they can be used to maximize employee efficiency, morale, and the bottom line.Offering sensible solutions to everyday problems, this informative volume shows how employees with different cultural, religious, and ethnic backgrounds respond to specific managerial techniques. The authors demonstrate, for example, why effective incentive systems in Japan might decrease productivity in United States, and why successful efforts to create team-based cooperation in Russia could alienate rather than motivate workers in England. Each chapter focuses on a different management problem - effective communication, motivation of workers, turning groups into teams, leadership skills, and quality management production - and following each chapter are quick reference charts that neatly summarize the text. The authors also include a table which provides cultural profiles of nearly 50 countries from major business centres around the world.Now more than ever, multinational managers need to be in touch with the range of cultural issues that can affect their overseas operations. With The Transplanted Executive in hand, managers the world over will have a user-friendly guide to understanding and mastering the subject.

This series considers theoretical, methodological and research issues relevant to organizational sociology. It is specifically concerned with trying to specify the unique contributions of broad sociological theories and research techniques to the analysis of organizations. Both micro and macro sociological approaches are emphasized. From a micro perspective an effort is made to bring to the forefront such perspectives as phenomenology, ethnomethodology and symbolic interaction. The macro analysis also places an emphasis on the institutional, historical and cultural examination of organizations. An effort is made to use this series as a forum for the presentation of theories and research which challenge conventional views of organizational sociology. This volume presents an examination of organizations which is cross-cultural, covering all areas of cultural diversity and spanning countries, generations and identities.