Work design expectations of Japanese MNCs’ local managers in English-speaking and Far East cultural clusters – USA, Thailand and India

Abstract

PurposeThe importance of work design to organizational engagement and firm performance is increasingly recognized in management scholarship. For international business, a majority of variation in work design based on national cultures is addressed through cross-cultural management scholarship. However, there is a paucity of qualitative research on the influences international business human resource managers face for work design in the intercultural environment of overseas subsidiaries. The purpose of this interpretivist study was to examine the lived experience of overseas subsidiaries’ local managers to surface a more nuanced understanding of their expectations and related implications for work.Design/methodology/approachEmpirical research was conducted through semistructured in-depth interviews with senior managers of subsidiaries of Japanese MNCs in USA, Thailand and India.FindingsThe findings of the study develop and extend on prior cross-cultural management scholarship on world cultural clusters revealing changed expectations of work in intercultural work environments as instantiated by Japanese MNCs.Social implicationsThrough engaging work design, international businesses can contribute to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 8 that pertains to decent work.Originality/valueThe study adds to extant understanding of the work design antecedent to engagement by broadening to intercultural environment impacts understanding facilitated by empirical lived experience data and suggesting a modification to extant theory. This study pioneers in taking world cultural clusters as the field for evaluating data.