Jane E. Salk

National culture, networks, and individual influence in a multinational management team

Individual influence is thought to shape team performance. However, empirical studies of its potential determinants in multicultural teams, including national culture, are lacking. A network study ...

Partners and Other Strangers

What actually happens when managers from two or more nations and firms come together to form a new joint-venture management team? Joint-venture researchers tend to view a management team whose members come from two or more countries as a complicating factor that often leads to difficulties and disappointing performance (e.g., Killing, 1983; Lane and Beamish, 1990; Zeira and Shenkar, 1990). By contrast, researchers concerned more generally with how to manage cultural diversity in organizations and groups (Adler, Doktor, and Redding, 1986; Cox and Nkomo, 1990) suggest looking at cultural differences as a source of managerial synergies. Alhough Adler et al. (1986) discussed the need for a synergistic model to understand cross-cultural relations in organizations, there has been little empirical development of such a model. Models of cross-cultural synergy assume that team participants can recombine normative and behavioral elements from their distinct backgrounds. This study focuses upon the early weeks and months of experience, a period when important precedents and patterns of interaction may be set, in three shared management joint-venture teams. Shared-management international joint ventures (IJVs) are a theoretically and practically important setting in which to pursue the question of how culturally diverse management teams develop. Shared-management IJVs are a particular type of joint venture in which the

Generic and type-specific challenges in the strategic legitimation and implementation of mergers and acquisitions

Both research and practitioner-oriented work on mergers and acquisitions tend to discuss them as if they were a single form of organization, with specific organizational and implementation imperatives and issues. This paper develops a typology of merger and acquisitions, differentiating them in terms of three dimensions: the strategic goal(s); the integration approaches indicated by varying needs for interdependence and autonomy; and alternative forms of governance. The sorts of psycho-social issues and implementation imperatives indicated vary greatly from one type of merger and acquisition to another. Differences in implementation strategies across these three types of mergers and acquisitions are discussed, as are the implications of the typology for advancing managerially relevant research on mergers and acquisitions.

Social Performance Learning in Multinational Corporations: Multicultural Teams, their Social Capital and Use of Cross-Sector Alliances

Multinational corporations (MNCs) confront complex challenges to continuously achieve higher levels of social performance across diverse country and cultural contexts. Yet many MNCs have reactive strategies toward corporate social responsibility (CSR). Such strategies do not leverage multicultural team diversity for dynamic learning. Meanwhile, cross-sector alliances between MNCs and not-for-profit entities present a rich opportunity for MNC learning. Multicultural teams often lie at the core of such initiatives in MNCs, although they have been, at best, a peripheral concern of CSR research and theory. We redress this gap in the CSR literature by integrating theory on social capital and the external team perspective and applying this to the CSR context. Our analysis has practical implications for MNCs as well, suggesting further extensions.