Katherine Xin

Building Effective International Joint Venture Leadership Teams in China

An overlooked factor affecting the success or failure of international joint ventures is the effectiveness of the leadership teams put in charge. In this paper, we analyze the special features of leadership teams in Chinese-foreign joint ventures and identify ways to improve their effectiveness. We identify five key elements of the IJV leadership team--composition, process, structure, incentives, and the leaders behaviors--that have important implications for IJV success. Our analysis is based on the literature on top management teams, cross-cultural behavior, international joint ventures, and our own in-depth interviews with leadership teams from international joint ventures in China.

Executive Education in the 21st Century

Executive education is changing. As we move into the 21st century, numerous forces are causing a transformation in not only its delivery but also its purpose. According to executives from 25 global firms, executive education will be more directly geared to making leadership and change management work. We describe shifts in six areas: learning needs, learning content, pedagogy, instructors, participant mixes, and organizational integrating mechanisms. Problem areas also are explored, particularly in the areas of program assessment and sponsorship. The concluding section describes what the authors feel must be the ultimate outcomes of these trends in terms of the transformation of executive education in the 21st century as a critical lever for facilitating strategic transitions.

Relational Demography and Relationship Quality in Two Cultures

Prior research has shown that demographic similarity between supervisors and sub-ordinates shapes supervisor-subordinate relationship quality in US settings. The current study extends this body of research by comparing effects in a US production facility to effects in a Mexican facility owned by the same company. Results suggest that, in both locations, demographic similarity influences the quality of relationships between supervisors and subordinates. The specific patterns in Mexico, however, are not identical to those in the United States. Age similarity has negative effects on relationship quality in Mexico, but not in the United States. Also, gender similarity has a stronger positive impact on one dimension of relationship quality (trust) in Mexico, but it has a stronger positive impact on a second dimension of relationship quality (leader-member exchange) in the United States. Both the overlap and disparities between demography effects in the two regions are important considerations when attempting to transfer human resource management practices, such as diversity management programmes, across the American-Mexican border

No es como mí: Relational demography and conflict in a Mexican production facility

In recent years management scholars have conducted an array of studies on relational demography. Most of this research, however, has taken place in the USA. Also, few of these prior investigations have looked at the role of moderators. In an effort to begin addressing those gaps, this study assessed the relationship between individual demographic dissimilarity and conflict in a Central Mexican workplace; additionally, it examined the moderating role of supervisor facilitation. Data from 190 Mexican workers revealed that in this study, as in comparable US studies, conflict had a two-dimensional structure consisting of task conflict and emotional conflict. Associations between relational demography and conflict, however, were not identical to those previously found in the USA. Individual dissimilarity in age was positively associated with emotional conflict, while individual dissimilarity in tenure was negatively associated with both task and emotional conflict. Supervisor facilitation moderated the relationships between tenure dissimilarity and conflict. These results suggest that greater attention to demography effects, as well as moderators of those effects, in Mexico is warranted.

Same bed, different dreams: Working relationships in Sino-American joint ventures

Despite the fact that tens of thousands of international joint ventures, involving billions of dollars of foreign investment, have been established in China since the reform movement began in 1979, little is known about how the local and foreign managers view each other and work together in these ventures. This omission is particularly glaring since so much of the prescriptive advice for doing business in China asserts that a trusting and cooperative relationship is a key to success. We interviewed a variety of managers in established Sino--American joint ventures to shed light on how these managers understand their relationships. The results are somewhat disconcerting. The views that the American and Chinese managers have of each other are not particularly positive. We chronicle these views and then discuss how these results can both set the stage for subsequent research and also serve as a stimulus for managers in China today to examine their relationships and perhaps intervene to improve them.

Corporate Culture in State-Owned Enterprises: An Inductive Analysis of Dimensions and Influences

We collected qualitative data from 120 senior managers in state-owned enterprises in the People’s Republic of China. Ten organizational culture dimensions that relate to an organization’s capability in internal integration and external adaptation and organizational culture’s effects on three organizational and three employee outcomes were identified. Two focus group discussions were conducted to verify the dimensions and explore causal relationships. We compare the Chinese organizational cultural dimensions with Western dimensions and note some unique organizational cultural dimensions in Chinese state-owned enterprises.