Multinational Workforce Research Articles

Cross-cultural leadership styles in multinational corporations: A comparative literature review

This review explores the dynamic landscape of cross-cultural leadership styles within multinational corporations (MNCs). As organizations expand globally, understanding the intricate interplay of cultural nuances on leadership becomes imperative for sustainable success. This study delves into existing research to compare and contrast various cross-cultural leadership styles prevalent in MNCs, aiming to provide insights into the complexities and challenges faced by leaders operating in diverse cultural contexts. The review identifies key cultural dimensions, such as individualism-collectivism, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, masculinity-femininity, and long-term orientation, which significantly influence leadership behaviors across different societies. Scholars argue that effective cross-cultural leadership requires a nuanced approach that acknowledges and integrates these cultural dimensions. The analysis highlights how leaders must navigate cultural diversity, adapt their communication styles, and cultivate a global mindset to foster collaboration and cohesion within multinational teams. Additionally, the review sheds light on the role of cultural intelligence (CQ) and its impact on leadership effectiveness in MNCs. Leaders with high CQ demonstrate the ability to comprehend, adapt, and capitalize on cultural differences, fostering positive outcomes in diverse organizational settings. The synthesis of literature also addresses the challenges faced by leaders, including ethnocentrism, stereotype biases, and the need for continuous learning and development in the face of evolving global business landscapes. By comparing findings from various studies, this review contributes to a comprehensive understanding of cross-cultural leadership in MNCs. It emphasizes the need for leadership development programs that cultivate cultural awareness and sensitivity, ultimately fostering adaptive and effective leaders capable of navigating the intricate web of global business environments. As organizations strive for international success, the insights gleaned from this review provide a foundation for refining leadership strategies that align with the diverse cultural fabric of multinational workforces.

The Power of Visualization – Instilling Safety Excellence in Multinational Workforces at Wind Farm Construction Sites

The construction of wind farms involves a mixture of – often centrally deployed – highly specialized experts and local resources depending on the type of activity. The common denominator is that crews are increasingly multinational. For the prevention of accidents and adverse impacts, safety requirements have to be communicated to the workforce in a form which is adequate to the workforce composition and easy to deploy to remote worksites. Field work performed by the authors indicates that visual and/or digital tools for effective safety communication are not yet widely employed, and many field safety trainings and toolbox talks rely on written communication of rules with often repetitive content and no checks of effectiveness. Ways of effective field safety communication are analysed and an approach is presented for enhancing in-the-field conversations and toolbox talks for field sites with limited access to digital learning tools. Simple and easy-to-deploy visuals will remain to be important in-the-field aids for safety communication in remote areas, even as advanced immersive training methods become increasingly available. Any tools should be designed for or should be adaptable to the composition of workforces in terms of language skills, workers qualifications and demographic aspects such as age or diversity. Lastly, field safety communication and training should always be accompanied by personal interactions between workers and supervisors and/or peer multipliers to highlight the “why” behind safety, i.e. the role of every single individual for providing a sound and healthy operating environment and ultimately protecting human lives.

Impact of flexible work arrangements on employees’ perceived productivity, organisational commitment and perceived work quality: a United Arab Emirates case-study

PurposeThis study aims to examine the impact of flexible work arrangements (FWAs) on employees’ perceived productivity, quality of work and organisational commitment (OC) with a special focus on the United Arab Emirates. It also analyses the mediating effect of employee happiness on the relationship between FWA and employees’ perceived productivity, OC and perceived work quality.Design/methodology/approachA quantitative, non-experimental correlational study was used for this research project. The study yielded numerical data, which were analysed using a deductive approach. The analysis aimed at exploring the relationships between the constructs, which were viewed as variables; these relationships were considered correlations, mediation and moderation. The sample comprises employees currently working at different public and private sector organisations, representing all major service industries in the UAE. Nine questions were used to assess the flexibility at work and six out of the nine questions were used to measure the level of FWAs using the Likert scale.FindingsFWA has a significant and positive association with the employees’ perceived productivity, quality of work and OC. It was confirmed that happiness plays a mediating role in the relationship between FWA and employee outcomes. The facility allows employees to manage their personal and professional lives with ease using their preferred work method. This ability promotes employee satisfaction. In conclusion, managers and employees around the world should view FWAs as a positive tool to enhance employee productivity and OC, particularly in an emergency like the Covid-19 pandemic.Research limitations/implicationsThe participants’ honesty was a limitation, which could raise questions on the validity of this study. This limitation arises when the self-report method is used for data collection. Use of multiple instruments could be another limitation.Practical implicationsOrganisational leaders can use FWAs to improve employee outcomes. When an organisation grants flexible work options to employees, it implies that the organisation trusts its employees to complete the task. This factor motivates all employees to work with dedication, which is particularly true if the employees are creative people and wish to work on their preferred time and place.Originality/valueThis study is significant because the findings will allow managers to assess the benefits of using FWAs to improve employee productivity, particularly in the service sector. It combines the aspects of perceived productivity, OC and perceived work quality, as well as employee happiness to assess the role of FWAs in organisations. The study also investigates the influence of FWAs in improving these employee outcomes. Based on the literature review, this study on FWAs is the first of its kind in the UAE, the country using a truly multinational workforce coming from more than 100 countries and cultures.

Navigating race: intersectional boundary-making onboard transnational ships

ABSTRACT Ocean-going merchant ships provide a unique context to examine race, place and migration: ships are globally mobile total institutions, a transnational setting with a multi-national migrant workforce but no single host country. The article focuses on boundary-making among seafarers themselves, drawing on interviews with sailors, crewing agents, and a multi-sited ethnography onboard three vessels with full and mixed-nationality Asian crews. Extending scholarship on boundary-making through an intersectional and spatial approach, the article shows how national differences, segmented and gendered through the global labour market, also become racialized and reproduced. In and through the ship’s spatial organization, the seafarers perform racialized forms of difference and belonging that heighten social boundaries, often hardening them through the essentializing of cultural distinctiveness. These performances interact with other forces of inequality and forms of boundary-making, demonstrating how racial formation is intimately tied with constructions of masculinity, occupation status, and national character in and through space.

Mobilizing solidarity in factory occupations: Activist responses to multinational plant closures

Factory occupations are rare and sporadic events which shed light on the processes associated with the collective mobilization of workers’ power. This article utilizes Kelly’s agential and Atzeni’s structural explanations of worker mobilization to examine two disputes which took place during Britain’s long experience of deindustrialization: the occupations of Caterpillar’s tractor factory in Uddingston, Scotland, during 1987 and Vestas’ wind turbine plant on the Isle of Wight during 2009. Each occupation shared the context of multinational divestment and collective workforce grievance based on a common perception that their plant was economically viable and vital to the local economy. However, contrasting sources of leadership mobilized this sentiment in each case: union stewards from within Caterpillar, socialist activists from outside at Vestas. The article concludes that an effective explanation of occupations must synthesize structural and agential factors, emphasizing the coalescing role of activist networks and workers’ perceptions of their labour’s social utility.

Leadership humility and managing a multicultural workforce

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to understand how CEO Joseph Abraham of Commercial Bank, Qatar, has shaped the culture of the bank and driven increased success during his tenure there. This is one of a series of interview-based studies that are focused on South Asian CEOs, with the goal of better understanding their management style in a multinational context. This short paper explores how leadership style can impact the development of workplace culture among a multinational workforce to build a collaborative, innovative and high-performing organization.Design/methodology/approachThis paper uses primary interviews and supplements the analyses with secondary data sources and published research on leadership, organizational identity, culture and organizational ambidexterity.FindingsThe study found that cultural values and learned behaviors impact one's leadership and vision. In this instance, the CEO's leadership style demonstrated humility, an appreciation of diverse national cultures, and an ability to create organizational identity and cultivate a culture of ambidexterity, providing comfort to the organization in dynamically opposite contexts. All of these leadership features have enabled the organization to become more adaptive and perform better.Originality/valueThe narrative provides a glimpse of leadership humility and the implementation of those ideals in the workplace. The global experience of this South Asia-raised CEO provides an insider's view to decision-making and helps us understand how family, cultural background, and diverse work experience shape leadership behavior and culture in a multinational context.

The Lifelines of Empire: Logistics as Infrastructural Power in Occupied South Vietnam

In this essay, I argue that an important yet understudied consequence of the Vietnam War was an imperial turn toward modern logistics management. I track how the US empire-state used the war as a crucible for forging new hybridizations of military and corporate logistics. Over the course of the war, imperial forces assembled a transpacific infrastructure for managing the just-in-time flows of commodities and bodies between the United States and South Vietnam. Drawing on prior US imperial experiences in Korea and the Philippines, American supply chain managers recruited a multinational workforce of Vietnamese, South Korean, and Filipinx nationals to labor along transpacific supply chains. I read archival sources to track how supply chain managers enmeshed these logistics workers in regimes of slow violence and death. As the war dragged on, logistics workers struggled to dismantle these sociospatial infrastructures of exploitation, devalorization, attrition, and control. What emerged out of this frictional politics of encounter was the blueprint for a new, more just-in-time form of imperialism.

An industry structured for unsafety? An exploration of the cost-safety conundrum in construction project delivery

Construction accidents can have major social, financial, reputational and legal implications. Hence, it is to be expected that safety is often presented as a key priority for construction organisations. However, existing evidence suggests that within the construction industry, safety often loses the battle when a trade-off is required with project cost. Improved understanding of the manifestations of the cost and safety interaction are needed. A three-year longitudinal study afforded the opportunity to investigate the safety implications of sub-economic bids on a large infrastructure project in the UK. While low-bidding to win tenders is not new, this paper presents empirical evidence of the consequential safety risk implications of such bidding at the project delivery stage. Faced with a perverse form of the tender ‘Winner’s Curse’ where the successful bid is frequently the lowest, cost-saving strategies are often implemented to recoup lost pricing margins. Our investigation revealed several instances of consequentially elevated safety risks, through cheaper and poor-quality equipment, machinery and temporary structures. In addition, lower-paid migrant workers – who already experience a statistically greater safety risk than local workers – were employed on the project without appropriate investment in a safety management approach suitable for a multinational workforce. The study both contributes to the call to critically rethink the construction industry’s competitive bidding practices, and highlights an industry structure that creates the conditions for high safety risks and accidents.

Provincial, Proletarian, and Multinational: The Antibureaucratic Revolution in Late 1980s Priboj, Serbia

AbstractMoving the focus away from the epicenters of the antibureaucratic revolution, this article looks at the echoes of this movement in the provincial, multinational, working-class community of Priboj, Serbia. A microstudy of Fabrika automobila Priboj, the town’s largest employer, and its surrounding community through records of self-management and party meetings and through the local press reveals some of the less-researched aspects of the social mobilizations in Serbia in the late 1980s. Without downplaying the spread of national grievances, this study highlights parallel phenomena taking place on the ground, such as labor solidarity, growing socioeconomic grievances, and the participation of non-Serb (in this case, Muslim) populations. The argument is that the presence of a large factory with a multinational workforce in the center of the municipality as the organizational core of the mobilizations and their focus on local problems helped Priboj’s antibureaucratic bevolution resemble the proletarian, pro-Yugoslav image that the leadership of the Serbian party often hoped to project.

Effective Electrical Safety Program Training in Multi-Lingual/Cultural Environments

The worlds’ global economy presents many challenges for companies seeking to establish a consistent electrical safety program. Immigration into the US has resulted in a workforce where English is not the first language. As well, foreign upbringing and schooling bring cultural and experiential differences from US nationals that can lead to very different paradigms and interpretation of programs and training. Alternatively, US companies attempting to establish a global presence in foreign locations can be met with an even more pronounced multi-lingual/cultural challenge. Many foreign cultures do not embrace electrical safety standards or do not have any significant enforcement toward the same. Western corporate cultures attempting to establish an electrical safety culture in foreign locations are often met with significant barriers. These barriers include multinational workforces utilizing labor from multiple impoverished countries with separate languages and cultures. Developing effective training programs that successfully impart the necessary safety requirements for skills and knowledge can be a seemingly insurmountable task. Many imported expat laborers from impoverished areas of the world feel they are expendable and uncared for, and expect to work unsafe and be treated poorly. These workers bring with them a lack of basic safety understanding and awareness due to the conditions that may exist in their original home country. This paper discusses some of the techniques utilized to overcome the above-mentioned barriers in electrical safety training. Chief among these techniques is creating an interactive environment between the trainer and all of the individuals—ensuring that no cultural group or individual fails to grasp the necessary electrical safety understanding due to a language or cultural barrier or combination of the two. Discussed is the use of workshops, hands-on exercises, prizes, contests, and a respect for culture, that are used to break down the walls.

Communicating Health and Safety on a Multinational Construction Project: Challenges and Strategies

The health and safety (H&S) of workers is a critical project management goal in construction. As globalization and migrant movement increases, construction projects are becoming more nationally diverse. Among multinational workforces, language barriers present an obvious but largely unresolved H&S communication challenge, with current strategies in use yet to be assessed. On a large construction project in the United Kingdom, H&S communication strategies were explored through an ethnographic approach. This paper contributes by revealing the impracticalities of using employees as interpreters in workgroups of six or more and the limitations of technologies in a dynamic construction site environment. It also highlights the unresolved challenge of translating safety videos in multiple languages. Challenges arose including translators refusing to translate because they were not receiving extra financial benefits or recognition in their workload. Translators were also given favorable treatment during disciplinary processes because they were crucial to the continued operation of the site team. This reveals the complexities involved in implementing effective H&S communication strategies on international and multinational projects, which have previously remained largely ignored.

Borderless companies versus born globals: Why we do need another label

This article is intended to show why borderless firms should be distinguished from traditional born global firms (BGs). Borderless firms have an internationally dispersed configuration of downstream, upstream and support value-added activities, an entrepreneurial team not bounded by a home base, and multinational founders, management teams and/or a multinational workforce. The concept of borderless firms emerged from analysis of empirical evidence and is intended to countervail the excessive focus of BGs literature on downstream activities. Drawing from five case studies, we found that borderless firms may be the result of ex-ante planning. However, most often, the internationally dispersed configuration of value chain activities seems to emerge from effectuation approaches, stemming from networking, including unexpected interactions, which may be envisaged as instruments to overcome constraints or to explore new business opportunities. The article shows that borderless firms present features which differentiate them from traditional BGs. Implications for entrepreneurs and researchers are provided in the concluding section.

Exploring safety management challenges for multi-national construction workforces: a UK case study

Large construction projects frequently operate with multi-national workforces, utilizing migrant workers to provide both skilled and unskilled labour. Multi-national workforces are also brought together through joint ventures, as companies from different countries collaborate and share their expertise to construct large and complex construction projects. A multi-national joint venture in the UK provides the case study for an examination of the safety management challenges found on such projects. Whilst language and communication issues amongst workers are typically primary concerns, here they have not been prioritized. Instead, findings are presented that illuminate more nuanced and unquantifiable problems that faced the safety management team. An ethnographically informed approach was mobilized, with the lead researcher spending three years on the site with the safety team gathering data. Analysis revealed several challenges: problems with non-UK company compliance with UK legislation and standards; differences in working practices amongst both non-UK workers and their managers; differences associated with national cultures; and problems of poor worker welfare. It is suggested that awareness of these challenges should inform both the way in which such projects are initially contracted, as well as the development of more sophisticated safety management systems that better support multi-national construction projects in practice.

The use of a Competence Fair to validate nursing competence

Strategies to ensure that nursing competence is maintained and validated are of increasing importance and are much discussed in the nursing literature. Professional bodies, employers, nurses themselves and most importantly patients need to have reassurance that competence across the profession is uniform and is maintained. This is of particular concern in the increasingly globalised and multinational workforces which exist in many health care institutions. This paper describes an educational initiative, and the evaluation thereof, which aimed to validate and enhance nurse competency in a multinational workforce in a medical city in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Results indicate that there was variability in competencies across the organisation which allowed for targeted educational interventions. The initiative was well received by the nurses in the organisation and the evaluation points to the need for ongoing strategies to ensure that competence in maintained.

Serious pneumococcal disease outbreak in men exposed to metal fume – detection, response and future prevention through pneumococcal vaccination

Welders and those exposed to metal fume are known to be at increased risk of pneumococcal pneumonia and invasive pneumococcal disease. Current UK guidance recommends that vaccination against pneumococcus be considered in those at risk of frequent or continuous occupational exposure to metal fume, taking into account the exposure control measures in place. We report an outbreak of serious pneumococcal disease that occurred between April and June 2015 among a multinational workforce exposed to metal fumes while working on the refurbishment of an oil rig in a Belfast shipyard. Four confirmed and five probable cases were identified, which occurred despite the use of environmental control measures and the availability of respiratory protective equipment. To provide direct protection to those at risk of pneumococcal disease and to eradicate carriage of pneumococcus and interrupt transmission, pneumococcal polysaccharide vaccine (PPV23) and antibiotic prophylaxis were offered to 680 individuals identified as potentially exposed to metal fume. Low levels of prior pneumococcal vaccination were reported among this target group (<1%). Genomic sequencing indicated a common strain of serotype 4 pneumococcus in two of the confirmed cases and a distinct serotype 4 in one case. The fourth confirmed case was identified as likely serotype 3 using a serotype-specific immunoassay on a urine specimen. Both serotypes 3 and 4 are vaccine-preventable strains covered by the conjugate and polysaccharide pneumococcal vaccines currently available. We propose that consideration should be given to strengthening implementation around pneumococcal vaccination for those exposed to metal fume through their work, even when other control measures are in place, to reduce the risk of future cases and outbreaks of serious pneumococcal disease.

From global start-ups to the borderless firm: Why and how to build a worldwide value system

Although the original concept of international new ventures included the geographic configuration of value activities, the subsequent development of the literature has gradually abandoned the concern about the geographic configuration of both input sourcing and output marketing to concentrate almost exclusively on the latter. Therefore, this paper argues that there is a need to re-focus the research so as to figure out how and why some companies are borderless. Borderless firms are defined as the result of the combination, early on, of geographically dispersed resources and capabilities, defying the home-base logic. A borderless firm presents the following characteristics (or a combination of them) from inception (or shortly thereafter): (i) value-added activities dispersed across different countries and regions; (ii) entrepreneurs not bounded by a home base; (iii) multinational founders and/or management teams; and (iv) a multinational workforce. To enquiry into this issue, the study uses five case studies of borderless firms. The results advance the understanding of the motives and processes behind the development, early on, of a borderless configuration of value activities.

Women’s Leadership

The Problem Women are well prepared to assume leadership roles—They have the education and the will, yet, they do not conform to gendered organizational images of ideal workers. Women often find themselves in a double bind once they advance into a leadership role: They must be cautious not to appear too masculine or too feminine while also personifying the “ideal” (male) worker by exhibiting masculine behaviors and unwavering commitment to the organization. Holding this line is challenging and often at odds with women’s identity and experienced conflicts between life and work. Our understanding of how best to prepare women for careers and create organizations that are hospitable to them is limited by implicit bias, inadequate learning and development strategies, and cultures resilient to change. Current human resource development (HRD) theory inadequately addresses the issues and challenges women leaders face because most leadership theory is based on privileged White males and highly essentialized. The Solution The world is burgeoning with global business, technological innovation, intense competition, and multinational workforces. HRD has a role to play in building effective global business if it can more robustly and broadly address issues related to diversity and inclusion in organizations, particularly the creation of cultures that accept a range of leadership styles and women leaders. It is time to challenge traditional, masculine views of leadership and question how leaders are developed. It is critical to understand women’s leadership if women leaders are to be developed and if persistent gender inequity in organizations is to be addressed. Stakeholders Women are obvious stakeholders, but, ultimately, everyone in organizations is a stakeholder benefiting from women leaders and improved leadership, in general. HRD professionals also benefit by understanding better how to develop women leaders, in particular, and leadership, in general. Globally, elected leaders, nongovernmental organizations, and nations can develop policy that has the potential to influence and create educational, occupational, and economic change for women.

Language Management in a Multinational Workforce: The Knowledge Worker Perspective

&lt;p&gt;Organisations recruiting knowledge workers worldwide face a considerable challenge with regard to the choice of corporate language. The use of English as a lingua franca is often perceived as the most obvious option. However, there may be good arguments for using the host country language even in cases where the language in question is relatively small and the English skills of the local population are high. Our paper reports on the results of a study of a Nordic organisation that has chosen the local language as its corporate language. We investigate the implications for the employees’ professional and social identity and also discuss the language ideology underlying this choice. The study is based on both interviews and a survey conducted among both local and international members of the organization.&lt;/p&gt;

Solidarity Action in Global Labor Networks. Four Cases of Workplace Organizing at Foreign Affiliates in the Global South

Globalization transforms workforces of transnational corporation from predominantly home countrydominated workforces into foreign-dominated, multinational workforces. Thus, the national grounding of trade unions as the key form of labor organizing is challenged by new multinational compositions and cross-border relocations of corporate employment affecting working conditions of employees and trade unions in local places. We assume that economic globalization is characterized by expanding global corporate network of vertically and horizontally integrated (equity-based) and disintegrated (nonequity-based) value chains. We also assume that globalization can both impede and enable labor empowerment. Based on these premises the key question is, how can labor leverage effective power against management in global corporate networks? This question is split into two subquestions: a) How can labor theoretically reorganize from national unions and industrial relations institutions into global labor networks that allow prolabor improvement in global workplaces? b) How and why has labor in a globalized economy secured the core International Labor Organization (ILO) international labor right to organize companies and conduct collective bargaining? The Global Labor Network perspective is adopted as an analytical framework. Empirically, a comparative case methodology is applied comprising four more or less successful industrial disputes where labor achieved the right to organize and undertake collective bargaining. The disputes took place in affiliated factories of foreign transnational corporations located in Malaysia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Turkey. The conclusion is that the combination of global labor capabilities and global labor strategizing must generate strategic labor power that adequately matches the weaknesses of the counterpart’s global corporate network in order to achieve prolabor outcomes. The most efficient solidarity action was leveraged by a cross-border alliance of workplace collectives, national industrial unions, and a global union federation using global framework agreements (GFAs) with key customers of the employer. The least efficient campaign relied primarily on domestic developing country state institutions supported by a foreign labor nongovernmental organization (NGO).

Areas Of Cross-Cultural Difference In The Workplace

In the last 30 years, there has been a shift towards using multicultural management strategies. The constant shifts taking place in multi-ethnic, multicultural, and multinational workforces indicate that both administrators of these organizations and higher education practices must evolve to adapt to needs for changing skill sets. A multicultural workforce offers advantages in that businesses may reach out effectively to various stakeholders. Leaders do well to cultivate an organizational culture that incorporates flexibility, understanding, and acceptance of alternate values, especially when working in foreign locations or multi-national organizations. Understanding of differences in cultural values and customs may reduce conflict and increase collaboration. To meet these challenges, leaders must be trained and educated to develop flexibility, understanding, and acceptance of alternate values when working in foreign locations or multi-national organizations. This article points out important areas of difference for organizations to address.