Working papers
Welcome to the Working Paper Series of the International Graduate School of Business. Papers are organized by name of author in alphabetical order. Titles and abstracts appear below. The full paper can be downloaded as PDF files. Interested parties can find contact details for all authors included in the full articles.
Mary Bambacas, Margaret Patrickson
Developing Supervisors as Skilled Communicators: The Role of HR
Effective communication is a major factor enabling supervisors to act as
a conduit in promoting HR policies to their subordinates. In particular,
given managers are now expected to take a major role in developing
subordinate commitment, communication skills have become an important
part of the process. This paper reports data from a small sample of HR
managers as to what actions they take to develop communication skills in
their managerial staff. Findings suggest that HR practitioners regard
communication skills as subsumed under a generic idea of leadership.
They focus on these skills at two main times- at managerial hiring when
communication ability appears synonymous with verbal fluency and
confidence, and during leadership development training when
communication skill is incorporated into the general rubric of
interpersonal behaviour. None report any specific focus on
communications skill levels, nor any attempt to formally or
quantitatively measure their presence in their managers.
View paper
(PDF 148 kb)
Dr Peter Lok, Paul Z Wang, Bob Westwood, John Crawford
Antecedents of job satisfaction and organizational commitment and
the mediating role of organizational subculture
This study investigates the relationships between employees’
commitment and its various antecedents, including employees’ perceptions
of organizational culture, subculture, leadership style, and job
satisfaction. Structural equation analysis examined a proposed model in
which organizational subculture mediated the influence of leadership
style and organizational culture on commitment, and in which job
satisfaction is an antecedent of commitment. Specifically the direction
of the causal effect between job satisfaction and commitment, the role
of subculture as a mediating variable, and the role of job satisfaction
as a mediator of the influences on commitment of its other antecedents
were examined. Comparisons with alternative models confirmed
satisfaction as an antecedent of commitment and the role of subculture
as a mediating variable. The results of this study contribute to the
clarification of the causal relations of the antecedents of commitment,
and highlight the important role of local leadership and subculture in
determining employees’ job satisfaction and commitment.
View paper (PDF 189 kb)
Dr Jo Rhodes, Dr Paul Walsh, Dr Peter Lok
Convergence and Divergence Issues in Strategic Management – An
Asian Perspective on the Balanced Scorecard in HR management
Global competitive pressures shape an enterprise’s focus on
strategic management systems, and in particular the Balanced Scorecard;
this shift suggests that global companies adopt a handful of management
best practices, most of which originate in the West. Divergence factors
such as national culture, leadership styles and human resource
management practices underscore the trend towards convergence of global
management practices; however, Asian empirical evidence on the
effectiveness of such practices is limited as is the impact of Asian
Balanced Scorecard contextual variables. This paper considers a
conceptual framework, based on the Balanced Scorecard, in which to
consider convergence and divergence impacts on developing high
performance cultures in Asian contexts. A Balanced Scorecard
implementation case study undertaken by the Central Bank of Indonesia is
the basis for discussing Asian firms’ challenges in adopting Western
management practices.
View
paper (PDF 101 kb)
Basil Tucker, Helen Thorne and Bruce Gurd
Management Control Systems and Strategy: What's been happening?
Global competitive pressures shape an enterprise’s focus on
strategic management systems, and in particular the Balanced Scorecard;
this shift suggests that global companies adopt a handful of management
best practices, most of which originate in the West. Divergence factors
such as national culture, leadership styles and human resource
management practices underscore the trend towards convergence of global
management practices; however, Asian empirical evidence on the
effectiveness of such practices is limited as is the impact of Asian
Balanced Scorecard contextual variables. This paper considers a
conceptual framework, based on the Balanced Scorecard, in which to
consider convergence and divergence impacts on developing high
performance cultures in Asian contexts. A Balanced Scorecard
implementation case study undertaken by the Central Bank of Indonesia is
the basis for discussing Asian firms’ challenges in adopting Western
management practices.
View
paper (PDF 629 kb)