There is a growing call to understand the influence of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on organizational outcomes, especially in developing economies. Given the strong link between organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and organizational performance and survival, on one hand, and the constant need in the literature to understand their antecedents, on the other hand, this study adopts the social cognitive theory to examine the relationship between employees’ perceptions of their organizations’ engagement in CSR and their individual engagement in OCB in Nigeria. Based on the relevance of organizational learning culture to both CSR and OCB, the study further examines the mediating role of organizational learning culture in the relationship between employees’ perceptions of their organization's CSR engagement and their individual engagement in OCB. We tested these relationships in a sample of 254 employees drawn from banking, oil and gas, manufacturing and service industries. The results showed that there is a significant positive relationship between employees’ perceptions of their organizations’ engagement in CSR and their exhibition of OCB. This relationship is mediated by organizational learning culture. The implications of the results for CSR, especially in non-enabling institutional contexts, were discussed.

Multinational enterprises (MNEs) transfer their corporate strategies to subsidiaries globally, and in so doing, embark on a translation process. Despite the prevalence of MNEs and their investments in emerging economies, little is known about how local factors affect key actors when translating corporate talent management (CTM) strategies to these regions. This study draws from the translation and talent management literatures to explore the travel of ideas in the context of CTM. Relevant frames (narratives that emerge around actions) and actors are proposed and explored empirically in a qualitative study of 76 employees across an Australian mining MNE with subsidiaries located in Latin America. The findings support extant literature as well as uncovering new frames (categorized in external or corporate, and internal or local) and actors (including non-managerial) as part of the translation process. The findings suggest the need to balance talent management strategies between corporate and subsidiaries by being aware of internal and external frames including in both urban and rural locations. This understanding provides further clarification of the global versus local paradox faced by MNEs. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.

Drawing on the job-demand resource theory, the article examines the relative importance and the complementarity of three widely practiced leadership styles – transformational, paternalistic, and authoritarian. It investigates how the three styles relate to followers’ work engagement amongst employees in Russian domestic organizations. It also theorizes and tests the mediating effects of three psychological mechanisms, namely self-efficacy, self-esteem, and job control, on the examined relationships. The findings show that all three leadership styles relate to followers’ work engagement positively. The relationship of transformational leadership is dominant and mediated by all three psychological mechanisms. The remaining two styles also make their unique contributions to followers’ work engagement. Whereas authoritarian leadership influences followers by enhancing their self-efficacy and self-esteem, paternalistic leadership operates more extrinsically by increasing followers’ job control. Surprisingly, our analyses found that the role of control variables such as gender, age, and hierarchical position were insignificant in predicting how the three leadership styles influence employee work engagement. The study is among the first to shed light on the relative importance of the three focal leadership styles, their differential influences and interrelations, and the different mechanisms through which they relate to followers’ work engagement.

Informal networking can be seen as a positive activity with beneficial outcomes for individuals, firms, and society as a whole, but informal networking can also lead to collusion, cliques, nepotism, and other forms of unethical or corrupt conduct – largely related to research on emerging markets. To date, the construction of informal networks and their cultural intertwinement and development have not been a focus of international management and organization studies, a gap that this special issue seeks to address. This special issue contributes to a better understanding of the dynamics of informal networks and their ambivalence, in which the same networks have different modes of operation and have positive and negative sides intermittently or simultaneously. We demonstrate the context in which informal networks operate, highlight their complexity, and encourage dialogue among scholars studying informal networks in a variety of countries. Using a context-based and comparative perspective allows us to conceptualize informal networks in a more integrated and balanced way. Understanding the workings of informal networking – known variously as guanxi, yongo, jentinho, wasta, and blat – in culturally specific settings, places Western values, social structures, and ideals of behavior in perspective and tests Western-centered assumptions, narratives, and theories. Because informal networking is a conventional way of conducting business in many countries, as depicted in this special issue, defining the bright (positive) and the dark (negative) sides of informal networks is critical for responsible management and business success at multinational corporations.

There is still an ongoing debate regarding the firm performance implications of pay gaps between top executives and subordinate employees. This study integrates relative deprivation theory and tournament theory to investigate the potential nonlinear effects of pay gaps. We expect that at low levels of pay inequality, increased inequality hurts firm productivity, while at higher levels of pay inequality, increased inequality helps firm productivity. Our study of Chinese firms confirms that pay gaps have an approximately U-shaped relationship with firm performance. This nonlinear relationship is weaker in state-owned enterprises (SOEs) than in non-SOEs, suggesting that state ownership is an important moderator in the association. Overall, this study explains previous mixed findings regarding consequences of pay gaps with meaningful implications for policymakers and entrepreneurs in China and other economies with similar cultural and institutional backgrounds.

Previous research has debated whether guanxi persists or declines with the development of formal institutions. This study addresses this debate by investigating how the development of formal institutions in China's state-owned organizations influences employees’ guanxi behavior. Building on institutional logics theory, I propose that guanxi behavior is a reaction to the socialist institutions adopted by state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and is associated with the collective identity of SOEs. Thus, employees’ identification with SOEs is the mechanism that influences their guanxi behavior. A survey of 721 employees from 12 organizations compared guanxi behavior across three types of organizations with different degrees of state ownership: SOEs, public firms, and joint ventures. The results showed that the employees of joint ventures identify less with SOEs and engage in less guanxi behaviors than do SOE employees. The employees of public firms still identify with SOEs, and their guanxi behavior did not differ from that of SOE employees. Identification with SOEs mediated the effect of organizational type on guanxi behavior, whereas formalization did not. Therefore, the development of formal institutions does not necessarily decrease guanxi behavior, and its effect depends on whether the collective identity underlying guanxi is changed. This study has important implications for guanxi research, institutional logics theory, and transition economies.

We investigate how the relevance of the Lean Production System (LPS) as perceived by employees of a Russian bank depends on whether LPS practices are labeled with transliterated original Japanese words or translated Russian words. Building on organizational translation scholarship contextualized to Russia, we formulate hypotheses about the mechanism through which labels affect the perceived relevance of practices. The results of an experimental study situated in a Russian bank show that transliterated Japanese labels have a negative impact on the perceived relevance of LPS practices by Russian employees. Further analysis reveals that this negative perception is fully mediated by the label's semantic fit, that is, the extent to which the label complies with the linguistic codes of the Russian language. Specifically, we find that, on average, the transliterated Japanese labels have a lower semantic fit than the translated Russian labels, and this difference in semantic fit explains the Japanese labels’ lower relevance as perceived by the bank's employees. By unpacking the causal effect of the labels used for management practices on the practices’ perceived relevance, this study advances our understanding of how organizations could influence employees’ acceptance of foreign management practices.

Extant literature focuses on within-dyad opportunism (i.e., transgression of the norms of a specific business relationship) while neglecting pro-relational opportunism (i.e., transgression of societal norms to benefit the relationship), resulting in limited understanding of their different effects. We argue that opportunism is a significant threat to the identity of business partners and boundary spanners which results in different relational dynamics at different levels, that is, Type-I (i.e., interorganizational identification squeezing out interpersonal identification) and Type-II identification asymmetry (i.e., interpersonal identification dominating interorganizational identification). Identification asymmetry further mediates the effects of opportunism on exchange performance. Based on a matched manufacturer–supplier sample, we find strong support to the hypotheses. Moreover, distributive fairness aggravates the effect of pro-relational opportunism on identification asymmetry, while interactive fairness mitigates it. Our research provides more nuanced between-level findings on identification in interorganizational settings, and cautions against firms’ tendency toward Machiavellian reasoning when they face the temptation of complicit behavior for organizational gains.

We study firm level antecedents that drive different motives of internationalization of emerging economy firms. Based on firm's resource based considerations of asset exploitation versus asset augmentation and locational advantages of host countries, we provide a framework to classify the motives of internationalization of emerging economy firms belonging to knowledge intensive industries. Motives of internationalization have been classified into three broad categories – market-seeking, opportunity-seeking, and strategic asset-seeking. We determine motives behind different modes of internationalization – alliances, acquisitions, and greenfield ventures. Drawing upon the adaptability, amalgamation, and ambidexterity (AAA) advantages from the springboard perspective, we find that firm characteristics like R&D investments, availability of financial slack, firm's ownership structure, and family control shape up its motive of internationalization.

There is a paucity of research exploring the use of local facilitators in cross-cultural research in Chinese cultural contexts and the impact this may have on data generation and knowledge creation. Addressing this gap, this paper critically reflects on cross-cultural interviews in Hong Kong. The reflection is centred on the experience of interviewing as an outsider to the culture of the participants and later working alongside an insider. While insider and outsider positionalities are formed from a multitude of intersectional characteristics, both gender and nationality emerged as primary influencers in this context. This paper contributes to the methodologically oriented literature by making salient the complexities of deciphering the multitude of influences originating from the researcher's positionality in relation to research others. Specifically, this paper highlights how both insider and outsider positionalities generate different, but complementary data through the exploration of participant's responses. ‘It's a Chinese thing’ or comments equating to it's a woman's thing were used by participants to either limit responses or expand and offer additional information, and the juxtaposition of these responses with those given to an insider help to highlight what this might mean for knowledge creation.

Managerial networking with political actors has long been recognized as a crucial co-option strategy to navigate the challenging institutional environment in emerging economies. However, we know much less about what drives the variation of political networking investment by private ventures. Drawing on resource dependence theory, we unpack the dyadic business-government relations and identify the key organizational and environmental factors that shape the power dependence relationships between private ventures and the government. By examining power imbalance and mutual dependence in this dyadic relationship and considering both the necessity and the capability of political networking, we develop hypotheses regarding the ways in which size-, connection-, and location-based dependencies affect firms’ political networking intensity. These hypotheses are tested through a unique survey of Chinese private ventures. Our study finds that political networking intensity (1) has an inverted U-shaped relationship with firm size, (2) is negatively associated with the presence of embedded political ties while positively associated with that of achieved political connections, and (3) is smaller when the focal firm is located in business development zones. This research bears rich implications for our understanding of corporate political activity in emerging economies from a resource dependence lens.

Pursuing an international career in China can be risky particularly when there is a lack of informal relationships and knowledge of the socio-cultural environment of the country. Drawing from social capital theory of career success and intelligence theory, this study investigates the influence of expatriate manager-local subordinate guanxi on expatriate managers’ career performance and the contingency role of cultural intelligence. Using multi-source data from a sample (N = 154) of expatriate managers in China, our results show that expatriate manager-local subordinate guanxi positively influences expatriate career performance, and that this relationship is positively moderated by expatriates’ cultural intelligence. The broader theoretical and practical implications of the findings for international careers are fully discussed.

Universities in China have increased their entrepreneurship significantly, yet a good understanding of the specific characteristics of university-based technology transfers remains missing. This study focuses on a special type of university spinoffs in China, University-Run Enterprises (UREs), and examines how URE eminence contributes to a university's technology transfer performance, using panel data covering 195 universities over the five years from 2002 to 2006. The findings reveal that URE eminence not only signifies a university's strong entrepreneurial culture, but also signals commercial values and quality of the university research. It moderates the contribution of university scientists from the supply side and that of sourcing firms from the demand side.

We hypothesize that informal bank networks influence corporate credit access in China. Our sample comprises a panel of 515 corporations listed on China's stock exchanges with a total of 1,052 firm-year observations, holding a total of 7,009 major bank loans from 183 distinct banks between 2007 and 2012. Results support the hypothesis that closure in bank networks facilitates credit access. We further show that the positive closure-performance association offers fewer advantages if financial markets and the legal infrastructure are relatively well developed. Our findings contribute to an emergent literature examining how informal networks can productively substitute weak formal institutions, and how the interplay between informal networks and network embeddedness shapes individual and corporate strategies.