Emerald Studies in Global Strategic Responsiveness – serie

The responsive global organization can adapt business operations across multinational markets in response to unpredictable changes in the turbulent global marketplace. This book deals with different aspects of the effective multinational corporation (MNC) pointing to new ways in which the MNC can enhance responsiveness faced with increasing market turbulence. Drawing on contemporary research in strategy and international business, the book considers relevant aspects including subsidiary autonomy, individual and team engagement, local knowledge, knowledge-based innovation, dynamic integrative processes, cross-cultural management, crisis handling, and the impact of abrupt events.The diversity of multinational business provides many opportunities, but also distinct challenges that must be managed effectively. Here an interactive dynamic between headquarters and local business units is driving responsiveness and adaptive behaviors. Corporate headquarters must structure a multinational organization so adaptive initiatives exploit local market insights where opportunities evolve from autonomous responses around the world. This can entail crisis responses involving both local and corporate efforts as a robust way to handle unexpected incidents. Such interactive approaches constitute a combination of central integration and decentralized local responses as the basis for a dynamic adaptive system. To make this work in a multinational context, we must consider the intricate interplay between corporate values and local cultures, and understand how leadership philosophies influence how diverse employees act as team players and global corporate citizens. The book provides relevant insights on all these important issues.

The global business environment is becoming increasingly volatile and unpredictable, reflecting the consequences of operating in a dynamic and complex business environment in constant flux with the potential of extreme outcomes. As a consequence, corporate performance data generally displays very few high-performers and a fat tail of many underperforming firms. This business context means that contemporary managers need to be equipped to deal effectively with implied uncertainty, abrupt events, and extreme outcome effects. This volume presents a number of promising ideas about how to deal with the strategic challenges of global business turbulence, as presented at the 2018 EURAM Conference held in Reykjavik, Iceland. There is a need for effective adaptive strategies to survive and prosper in the unpredictable contexts of corporate activities. The various contributions are grounded in prior strategy research but adopt multiple methodological approaches to engage diverse relevant knowledge that can advance this increasingly important field of study. The book presents new perspectives in the study of responsive adaptive processes in organizational settings that has high relevance for social science researchers with interests in these issues. Intelligent and curious managers and management students can likewise gain access to new ideas that may inspire their current thinking on effective organizational practices.

The past decade has seen global business conditions affected by major socio-economic crises. These have highlighted a pressing need to build resilient organizational structures with effective responsive processes. Businesses are more exposed to uncertain and unknown factors, as well as significant environmental exposures, making the call for resilient and responsive capabilities ever more urgent.The ability to engage in responsive strategy-making under rapid and potentially extreme environmental changes requires a leadership approach that prioritises specialized experiential knowledge of internal and external stakeholders and a capacity to develop organizational settings that enable collaborative ways of working.Strategic Responses for a Sustainable Future considers how modern organizations can respond to deal with increasingly uncertain environmental conditions. Chapters cover adaptive processes to enhance responsiveness, the adoption of green and open strategies, as well as “maverick” methods of resource management and driving innovation, all with the aim of creating effective solutions that can sustain business growth and performance.

Navigating Corporate Cultures From Within offers a unique perspective on the management of headquarter-subsidiary-host market relationships with important insights on how to align corporate values with a localized mindset among culturally diverse employees and across a global enterprise.The shared norms and values that constitute a specific cultural setting supposedly create a common background for using a collective 'we' when referring to every individual employee in the organization. Yet, company values are engineered over time, are molded, and redesigned to match ongoing changes in both the external and internal environment, and their aim is to make the organization adapt faster to changing market conditions, globally as well as in local host markets.This study takes a closer look at the dynamic process of cultural renewal in a complex multinational organization with a particular focus on the role assumed by the individual employees. This is an entirely new way of looking at the effects of important corporate values where a common approach previously has been to look at organizational culture from a confined top management perspective. The findings in this book will be essential to the management of multinational enterprises.

A number of truly disruptive events have occurred in recent times, from the financial crisis and the pandemic to political conflict with broad ramifications for international business conduct. National borders have been severely constrained with radical effects on global value-chains and supply conditions. We must respond to these unpredictable developments in ways that create resilience and advance sustainable solutions.The global business environment is highly uncertain, fractured by unforeseen events and making decisions that deal with a largely unknown future. Following the global scale of COVID-19, the divergent uncoordinated actions of regimes around the world, and the more recent demonstration of brutal military interventions in Ukraine, the long-term belief that globalization is the bedrock of future wealth-creation is being questioned. As the system scrambles to cope with the costs of necessary adjustments to realign the international economic system, we realize that organizations must improve their ability to respond.To support these considerations and foster constructive thinking about effective response capabilities, this volume of articles presents a new set of studies that attempt to better understand and address this very need. The contributions consider the diverse effects of institutional settings and subtle organizational strategy-making contexts gauging ways to gain flexibility and strategic adaptability that can generate sustainable performance outcomes.

Multinational organizations are faced with ongoing shifts in socio-economic conditions and cultural demands in diverse market contexts. Adapting to these changing conditions will require a balance between hierarchical and networked structures that enable integration of autonomous and inclusive modes of local business activities. From this vantage point, we explore central aspects of empathy and mindfulness as the means to accommodate different assumptions between headquarter managers and employees dispersed across host countries with diverse cultural norms and values. Chapters are presented here from around the world exploring operational management, the global-local nexus, tacit knowledge in MNCs, corporate culture, employee mindfulness and setting out a future pathway for developing effective MNC structures. Emerald Studies in Global Strategic Responsiveness aspires to disseminate new inspiring research insights as a potential catalyst for the development of effective approaches to deal with the exposures imposed by dynamic complexities in the global business environment. The implied organizational and societal challenges require effective responses from both public and private organizations induced by supportive policy initiatives. The associated challenges are beyond the control of executive powers and exceed the capacity of single institutions thus underpinning a call for collaborative approaches and collective actions to foster viable solutions for a sustainable future.

Contemporary firms face complex dynamic environments notoriously difficult to predict, even impossible to foresee, where extraordinary events can inflict major disruptions. Interactive collaborative decision processes appear as better drivers of strategic adaptation. Yet, firms show vastly different ways of dealing with the challenges imposed by extreme exposures as environmental conditions change.The research presented here is developed from analyses of extensive European and North American datasets (1995-2019) spanning periods of economic expansion, recession, and recovery and explores how firms manage in a world with extreme exposures and how their failure and success affect the distribution of financial returns. Refined analyses show how left-skewed returns are associated with negative risk-return relations where high-performers generate better average returns at lower levels of risk. These results can also derive from firms with heterogeneous adaptive capabilities, which we model and use in computational simulations to show how it produces negatively skewed performance distributions and inverse risk-return outcomes.;The Emerald Studies in Global Strategic Responsiveness aspires to disseminate new inspiring research insights as a potential catalyst for the development of effective approaches to deal with the exposures imposed by dynamic complexities in the global business environment.

We need to develop a better understanding of how to generate effective strategic adaptation in times of abrupt environmental changes. The global interdependencies across specialized economic functions and markets require that business activities co-evolve across interacting public-private relationships where organizations can engage around viable ecosystems forming a sustainable path for the future. The ability to develop sustainable solutions thrives on innovative behaviors across networks of collaborative relationships and we need to enhance our understanding about how they can be established and managed.The chapters presented here by global scholars fill the void in current knowledge with the aim of generating important leads for forthcoming scholarship efforts for the benefit of business and society.Emerald Studies in Global Strategic Responsiveness aspires to disseminate new inspiring research insights as a potential catalyst for the development of effective approaches to deal with the exposures imposed by dynamic complexities in the global business environment. The implied organizational and societal challenges require effective responses from both public and private organizations induced by supportive policy initiatives.