Integrating Culture and Management in Global Organizations
INSIDE 2
IMQ News: A New Partnership
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Why Organizations Don’t Do More CrossCultural Training by Craig Storti
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A Comprehensive Guide to Cultural Assessment Tools
Women in International Management: Where Are They? by Margaret Linehan The investigation of women’s progress in international management is relatively new. Over the last fifteen years, empirical studies of women in international management have been undertaken predominantly in North America. Yet, many questions remain unanswered or have been only partially addressed. The international human resource management literature has given very little attention to women as expatriates, probably because international assignments have long remained a male preserve. Up to the early 1980s, research on women in international management was primarily restricted to the role of the expatriate wife in facilitating or hindering her husband’s performance overseas. This article reveals the results of new research on the senior female international managerial career move in Europe. Fifty senior female international managers were interviewed, representing a wide
range of industry and service sectors. At the time of interviewing, the managers were based in Ireland, England, Belgium and Germany, but had worked in many other European countries, in the United States and Japan. Many of the constraints that often hinder women in attaining senior managerial positions are quite similar in most countries. There are, for example, cultural, educational, legislative, attitudinal and corporate constraints in most countries. The relative importance of each constraint varies from society to society. Research by Izraeli and Adler (Competitive Frontiers: Women Managers in a Global Economy, Basil Blackwell, 1994) suggests that the specific image of an ideal manager varies across cultures, “yet everywhere it privileges those characteristics that the culture associates primarily with men.” The requirements for effective managerial
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Selecting an International W orkfor ce: Elusiv Workfor orkforce: Elusivee Best Practices by Michael Tucker Review: Global 8 Book Smarts
Volume 1, Number 2
Fall 20 0 0 E diti o n A quarterly publication produced by the Intercultural Management Quarterly and the Intercultural Management Institute at American University
How can we assign people to international positions who can live and work successfully across cultures? This question has been asked and debated for as long as human resource professionals have worked in the international arena. Today we find ourselves in the strange situation of having very good answers to this question, and yet few organizations are listening to the answers and implementing the best-proven and available practices. Indeed, recent surveys have shown that the great majority of multinational organizations are still making international selections based only on job skills, while they should also be considering the potential for intercultural adjustment as well as personal and family mobility issues. Very few organizations make use of proven selection systems developed and available outside of their organizations. So, what are these best practices? They begin with the simple but difficult situation of having
multiple candidates for each international position instead of a single choice. International human resource (IHR) professionals often report that it is difficult enough to identify one employee who can perform the international job, will accept the assignment, and is mobile, let alone try to come up with two or three. However, the very definition of the word “selection” requires alternatives from which to select. If you are not in the multiple candidate situation you are not even in the selection game – you are in the game of making “whole” the single choices that you have. On the other hand, if you can achieve a ratio of three candidates to one position and use the Overseas Assignment Inventory (OAI), which has known validity correlations, utility theory and actual practice show that failure rates can be dramatically reduced, resulting in huge cost savings. Continued on page 3