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Generating competiveness is an urgent priority for corporate global economic advancement, which is promoting attention to acquiring, developing and retaining a new type of internationally linked personnel. The importance of global mindset and related competencies has yet to receive wider scholarly attention in most Asian economies and this study addresses that gap by providing an exploratory empirical investigation of 132 Malaysian managers. Findings from an analysis of primary data demonstrate selection procedures play an important role in facilitating the customer relationship activities on synergistic business operations and these connections are culturally impacted. These exploratory observations infer business style and structures are shaped by cultural forces to provide a departure point for future investigations.

Transforming managerial competencies and mindsets is one of the most significant challenges facing contemporary Indian and Malaysian economies. This article provides empirical evidence demonstrating how managers in India and Malaysia are navigating the challenge of acquiring talented personnel to better facilitate central business activities in contemporary economic and cultural contexts. A salient theme of the article is that Indian and Malaysian managers are pursuing notions of human capital accumulation within a premise that the better deployment of resources is linked to an improvement in management systems and practices. The article posits that companies in the South East Asian landscapes are focusing on designing better selection and recruitment strategies to engage in continuous and innovative reform to cope with the demanding pressures of globalization.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the strength of organisational strategy, technology intensity and entrepreneurial orientation as predictors of managerial global mindset intensity in the Indian and Chinese service industry.Design/methodology/approach – A pluralist research design that captured quantitative and qualitative data from 239 Indian and 210 Chinese indigenous managers was evaluated to test the hypothesised relationships of a conceptual model that was developed from the contemporary relevant literature.Findings – The results of the investigation demonstrate that technological intensity and entrepreneurial orientation were significant determinants of managerial global mindset intensity. Qualitative information that revealed technological intensity and entrepreneurial orientation were dominant drivers from developing and nurturing managerial global mindset intensity.Research limitations/implications – In spite of both study countries having large populations, the evaluated samp...

The bottom of the pyramid (BoP) approach popularised by Prahalad and Hart (2002), calls for the engagement of business with the bottom segment of the global income pyramid, and has attracted considerable attention and debate. The BoP lens is applied chiefly to communities experiencing ‘extreme poverty’ in low income countries with little reference to the growing number of people living in ‘relative poverty’ in high income countries. For the purpose of stimulating academic debate this paper seeks to explore the role of the so-called fourth sector, a domain for hybrid business ventures of social (and, in the case of this paper, Indigenous) entrepreneurs, at what we refer to as ‘the bottom at the top of the income pyramid’ in Australia. Using examples of Indigenous and social entrepreneurship within disadvantaged communities, we seek to highlight the scope for fourth sector enterprises at the lower end of the income spectrum within developed countries. It is suggested that the business models found within the fourth sector offer promising, alternative approaches for addressing the economic as well as social and cultural needs of those living on the fringes of today’s increasingly fragmented high-income societies.

In this study, contemporary work-goal priorities of Asian managers are explored. The degree of convergence in the relative importance of work goals across six diverse national contexts undergoing substantial societal and economic changes is investigated. The 11 work-goal categories of the 1980s Meaning of Working Study (MOW) were employed. A questionnaire was administered to a sample of 1252 managers. This research also incorporated focus groups in each country to revisit the results in a procedure designed to better interpret the empirical findings. Analytic procedures employed in the MOW investigation were used to establish the work-goal priorities of contemporary Asian managers. Results show that, first, there was consensus for prioritization of a number of the work goals in the area of managerial development. Second, there were divergences in the importance of organization-related work goals, both across countries as well as within the investigated demographics of gender, age and managerial level. Last, there were differences in work-goal priorities compared with the earlier MOW study. The results are discussed in terms of the relationship between managerial work goals and a range of organizational issues.

This paper overviews the role of tradition in the structure, processes and behaviour of Chinese work organ izations. The traditional value frameworks combining Confucian, Taoist and Buddhist principles and prac tices had long been the surrogate of a well-defined legal structure in China. Social interaction based on the strong guanxi bonds dominates the managerial culture and such vehicles of social capital development are prerequisites of any substantive partnership building with China. The analysis presented in this overview attempts to explore the reasons for relative underdevelopment of managerial autonomy and innovation, and the predominance of collective face and networking. It is suggested that there are a number of strengths in the Chinese traditions that may be helpful in the emerging managerial transitions, while pointing out areas where breaking with the past may be necessary. This paper signals the importance of more research in Asian management to alleviate the ethnocentric basis of Western-oriented mainstream management.

This study reports the changing perceptions of work goals in a transitional society. Mongolia embraced market ideology in the decade of the 1990s after 70 years as a centrally planned economic system. This study of 208 managers points to interesting directions for many similar countries in central Asia undertaking deliberate and wide‐ranging changes. This paper departs from the traditional research approach in terms of its context specificity and in the recognition that no study of this nature has been previously undertaken.

The paper presents a comprehensive survey and critique of literature on human values and ethics in business across diverse cultures. According to the author, the key issue in this discourse is not about whose values and morality, but about what values and morality. The author argues for a holistic paradigm in this discourse, grounded in deep philosophy and drawing upon the spiritual values of humanism. The consumerist, market economy Western models of ethics cannot be the only answer to values issues surfacing in the wake of increasing economic globalization. The most exciting thing about international business is that it offers the opportunity to discover the human values that resonate through all cultures.1 What is more ethical—considering all nations as if they were same or accepting different standards of behaviour in different contexts?

Explores relationships between relevant work setting variables in a Hong Kong organization. The study examined a set of Western assumptions in terms of structural properties of centralization and formalization and the view that they will be negatively associated with workplace responses of motivation, job satisfaction and organizational commitment, while an enriched job content will be positively related to employee responses. There was empirical support for most of the connections of this framework, but formalization was observed to have positive relationships with employee perceptions and affections. In addition, there was evidence that the responses of the incumbents were influenced by the assessed demographic characteristics. These results provide further evidence that organizational members pay moderate attention to demographic attributes, yet this factor has not been a prominent component of contemporary job design research. The findings are reported in terms of the need to consider both demographic and sociocultural effects when explaining responses of individual employees.