Dr Kristine Marin Kawamura interviews Anne Tsui, PhD

Dr Kristine Marin Kawamura interviews Anne Tsui, PhD

Article Type: Scholars’ corner From: Cross Cultural Management, Volume 20, Issue 2

Background

Anne S. Tsui is Motorola Professor of International Management at the W.P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University, and Distinguished Visiting or Honorary Professor at Peking University, Xi’an Jiao Tong University, Fudan University, and Nanjing University. Dr Tsui’s research focuses on organizational culture and leadership, employment relationships, guanxi network in Chinese context, and care and compassion. She is the recipient of many honors and awards for her pioneering work, including the Administrative Science Quarterly Scholarly Contribution Award, the Best Paper in the Academy of Management Journal Award, the Outstanding Publication in Organizational Behavior Award (AOM), the Scholarly Achievement Award from the Human Resource Division of AOM, and the Center for Creative Leadership’s 2008 Walter F. Ulmer, Jr Applied Research Leadership Award. Dr Tsui is the author of numerous journal articles, book chapters, and edited books, including Demographic Differences in Organizations: Current Research and Future Direction (Lexington Books, 1999), co-authored with Barbara Gutek (a finalists for the AOM 2000 Terry Book Award). She is the 87th (among 778) most cited researcher in Business and Economics (1993-2003), 21st of the 100 most cited management scholars (1981-2001), and 49th of 150 most-cited authors among 25,000 management authors in 30 management journals (1981-2004). Prior to ASU, Dr Tsui was on the faculty of Duke University, the University of California, Irvine, and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, where she was Founding Chair of the Department of Management. She founded the International Association for Chinese Management Research and the Management and Organization Review – for which she is Editor-in-Chief. She was editor of the Academy of Management Journal, is a fellow and an elected officer of the Academy of Management, and was its President from 2011 to 2012.

Summary

Dr Tsui conducts phenomenon-based research in areas such as managerial effectiveness, employment relationships, guanxi in the Chinese context, cross-cultural management, and Chinese management. Dr Tsui founded the International Association for Chinese Management Research to encourage high-quality and high-impact research on China. She observes that Chinese firms succeed because their CEOs are keen learners, global in perspective, and open to new views; many caring leaders have also begun to see the value of culture in human and organizational life. She points out that many current leaders have also begun to see that culture influences social and organizational life, and she encourages scholars to study leadership as it is practiced in China – not the way it is practiced in the West. She encourages cross-cultural management scholars to contextualize their scholarship by embedding themselves in the geographies and cultures of their work and to work in international collaborative teams. Dr Tsui discusses key elements of her presidential address, “On compassion: why should we care?” which was delivered at the Academy of Management Meeting in Boston, August 5, 2012. She calls scholars and managers to care more – to ask big questions and to conduct research that expands knowledge and makes a difference in society. Given the rise of globalization, virtual teams, cross-border activities, and international collaboration, she envisions that this should be the golden age of cross-cultural management practice and research.

Interview

You have done groundbreaking research in many areas including leadership, cross-cultural management, Chinese management, and, lately, care and compassion. What has motivated your work?

I have always been interested in questions arising from the world of practice, what we call phenomenon-based research. Interestingly, most of us have forgotten that the first step in science is the observation and identification of (real world, natural or social) problems to be solved. This focus on real-world phenomena started from my dissertation on managerial effectiveness, and then it moved to the research areas of human resource management (HRM) unit effectiveness, demographic differences, employment relationships, social networks, and executive leadership. I want to understand why firms follow certain practices – why people react differently to the same conditions, why and when social networks matter, and why some transformational leaders inspire and others do not.

I have never undertaken a research project to fill a gap in the literature. I want my research outcomes to be relevant and practical. The papers I have written on methods, such as cross-cultural research and Chinese management, have the same purpose of encouraging scholars to do research that is grounded in the real world and to understand how the context affects behavior and decisions at individual or firm levels. We need to understand the context when we apply a theory that was developed in a different context. Sensitivity to context improves our research, both theoretically and practically. It assures that the theory is appropriate, validly explains the local phenomenon, and produces knowledge that is meaningful to the local context.

You talk about the need for scholars to ask big, important questions instead of technically precise and manageable research projects so that they may regenerate intellectual excitement and revitalize intellectual stagnation. What big questions are you asking or exploring now?

My current research interest is in understanding Chinese leadership, particularly at the executive level in privately owned firms. China has many successful private firms – in fact, millions of private firms contribute more than 50 percent of China’s GDP. Yet we know so little about how the entrepreneurs of these firms think and lead.

I have noticed many puzzles that I want to understand. What motivates these executives, particularly, what worldviews, values, and aspirations drive their actions? Why are some executives more caring than others toward employees, customers, or Chinese society as a whole? What developmental experiences formed them? How do caring CEOs differ from other Chinese leaders in their management approaches and corporate cultures? To answer these questions, I have isolated three major requirements for enlightened leaders: character, competence, and compassion. My research is in an early stage and may involve both qualitative and quantitative approaches. The project will last for at least five years. Along the way, I hope to write some papers and a book or two about Chinese leadership.

How has the modernization of contemporary Chinese society affected the characteristics of – and the requirements for – leadership and management in China? How is this affecting the Western world?

I am not qualified to answer this question because I have not yet done enough research on the topic. However, I can say that this question crosses many level of analysis. We can talk about the executive level, where the leaders must make strategic decisions about what products to make, what markets to enter, how to compete, how to organize, and how to manage employees, customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders. Middle-level leaders face an entirely different set of challenges, as do leaders at the lower or operational levels.

Focusing on the executive level, I have observed that Chinese CEOs are keen learners and have very global perspectives. Their strong learning orientation and openness to new ideas may explain the success of their firms. Even domestic firms have very globally oriented CEOs. These companies may pursue joint ventures just to learn from foreign partners.

China’s first development stage is growth in scale. The government is investing significant resources into state-owned firms and is grooming many global firms. Now that China has become the second-largest economy in the world, I predict that the Chinese Government and Chinese business leaders will focus on building strength and sustainability as the next stage of development. China is already a model for other emerging economies. Once our systematic research has revealed the still-metamorphosing Chinese management model or models, the Western world will be eager to learn from China.

In your research you have inductively studied Chinese leadership and management. What is the value (and weakness) of applying both paternalistic and transformational leadership styles to Chinese management?

Both the paternalistic and transformational leadership models were developed outside of mainland China. Paternalistic leadership was a term introduced to describe the leadership approach of Chinese business leaders in Taiwan and Southeast Asia. Those leaders operate, or operated, in very different political economies from those in mainland China. Transformational leadership, on the other hand, is derived from the West; that is, Europe and North America.

The Chinese mainland transitioned from a historical monarchy to a democracy in 1911 and then to a communist state. Since 1949, a series of political events have created havoc for the Chinese people, such as the Cultural Revolution that aimed to demolish all traditional culture and bourgeois behavior. From 1949 to 1979, private property was nonexistent. Every citizen was at the same economic level, with equal pay and benefits. We all know that the last 30 years have brought rapid growth and development to China.

This background is important to understand the Chinese mindset – especially that of China’s current leaders who are now in their 50s-70s. They lived through the Cultural Revolution, which brought horror and devastation but nevertheless failed to erase the Chinese cultural fabric. Confucianism, Daoism, and other traditional beliefs have resurfaced, and many Chinese leaders recognize the value of culture and philosophy, that life is more than economics. Now that they have attained economic wealth, some have begun to ask “what else?” The leaders who are asking this question, by the way, are searching for meaning and are different leaders and managers than those who are not yet thinking so broadly.

I am not sure that paternalistic and transformational leadership models are sufficient for describing Chinese leadership in mainland China. We might need something else. In a fairly large-scale project on Chinese CEOs (Tsui et al., 2004, Organization Dynamics), my collaborators and I have found many different leadership styles, as if Chinese leaders are following Chairman Mao’s advice of “let a thousand flowers bloom”. We desperately need more research to understand Chinese leadership styles and management approaches. And we need to study leadership as it is practiced in China – not as it is practiced in the West, or as it is described by existing theories or measured by existing scales.

In many of your articles you discuss the need to conduct cross-cultural management studies or to do international management research. How do we conduct cross-cultural research so that we can improve internal validity and the precision of prediction?

Suggestions regarding this question appear in “cross-national, cross-cultural organizational behavior research: advances, gaps, and recommendations” (Tsui et al., 2007) that I coauthored in 2007 with two students at ASU, Sushil Nifadkar, and Amy Ou. Sushil is now an assistant professor at Georgia State University and Amy is an assistant professor at the National University of Singapore. The paper was published in the Journal of Management, and I am pleased to mention that it won the 2012 Best JOM Paper Award. The paper is a major criticism of the treatment of “culture” in research. We explained, as others have done, that culture is a multidimensional construct that coexists with many other factors or institutions within contexts, such as nations. We simply cannot measure culture by using country as a proxy.

Let us use an example to illustrate how we might design a research project to assess the effect of corporate culture on employee commitment. We would need an accurate measurement of corporate culture, which is, like societal culture, also a multidimensional construct. We would also need an accurate measurement of employee commitment, which can be influenced by many factors other than culture. We would need to control for the most obvious factors such as employee demographics, leadership or supervision, firm size, or compensation levels. The same would be true of assessing employee outcomes as a function of the societal culture. We would need to measure culture validly and to control for other factors at the employee, firm, and social levels.

Let me give an example of a cross-national study. My colleagues and I have recently completed an article that will be published in the Academy of Management Journal (AMJ ) titled “Institutional polycentrism, entrepreneurs’ social networks, and new venture growth” (Batjargal et al., 2011). The article reports our study assessing the effect of entrepreneurs’ social networks on the revenue growth of new ventures in the USA, France, China, and Russia. We argue that in under-developed institutional settings, social networks are more important for venture growth than they are in better-developed institutional settings.

We used the polycentrism idea proposed by Ostrom (2005) to formulate our hypotheses – with polycentrism referring to the existence of multiple authority centers at multiple levels in different institutions. Instead of using a country proxy, we measured polycentrism by measuring multiple formal institutions in the economic and political domains. In addition, we controlled for national culture using a composite measure of cultural values, industry-level factors, firm-level factors, and entrepreneurs’ personal characteristics. If we had used the country proxy without the other controls, we would be unable to defend our argument that the effect is due to polycentrism – and not to culture, industry, or other factors.

What recommendations do you have for international scholars who want to successfully do research and publish in high-impact management journals?

This question reminds me of a paper directly addressing that issue (coauthored with Ou et al., 2012) “International collaboration for academic publications: implications for resource-based view and transaction cost theory” in Group & Organizational Management. The article confirms that international collaboration certainly is a common and recommended way to get published in top management journals – and that collaboration with US authors helps international authors to successfully publish in US journals. The article also offers a framework that shows how international collaboration teams can be managed to ensure the benefits of complementary resources and minimize the transaction costs involved in international research teams.

You say that homogenous use of a North American model of management research has limitations and that we need to pursue deep contextualization, develop innovative theories, and formulate novel questions. How do we get there from here?

We must do what anthropologists do: be totally immersed in the native land for a substantial period of time. Living like and with the natives teaches you to think and feel like the natives. If you cannot undertake such a challenge, make sure that at least one member of the research team is a native – or can think and feel enough like the natives to understand the context. However, I also have said that the fish in water may not be able to describe the water (Tsui, 2006). The advantage of international research teams is that non-natives can ask questions about contexts that natives might take for granted.

The context can be the country where you want to pursue your research or it can be the organization that you are studying. Minimally, you should be familiar with the land by following its development, including reading its newspapers, surfing its internet, visiting its organizations, and talking with its citizens. This relates to the idea of “engaged scholarship” that Boyer introduced in 1990 and Van de Ven (2007) applied to organizational research in his book, Engaged Scholarship: A Guide for Organizational and Social Research. Good scholarship requires deep engagement with the subject or object that you study. This principle applies to both natural and social sciences.

As Robert Park advised sociologists who were trying to understand social problems:

Go and sit in the lounges of luxury hotels and on the doorsteps of the flophouses; sit on the Gold Coast settees and on the slum shakedowns; sit in the Orchestra Hall and in the Star and Garter Burlesque. In short […] go and get the seat of your pants dirty in real research (From Bulmer, 1984, quoted in Tsui, 2009).

We cannot study organizations in China by sitting in our offices in Chicago, Paris, or Sydney.

What may be hampering the advancement of Chinese management knowledge? How do we improve the rigor and respect of grounded theory and qualitative research methods? How do we create appropriate measures? How do we “indigenize” research, rather than translate and back-translate? How do we adjust research methods and tools?

I think we must relearn what research or science is all about. It is not just about publishing papers, although of course, we need to publish the results of our research. It is for solving puzzles in our natural or social world. We must be curiosity-driven and have a keen desire to solve interesting and important conundrums.

When we think about Chinese management, we need to question aspects that seem most puzzling. We should ask more “why” questions and fewer “what” questions. We must not blame our failure to ask the important questions on the promotion and tenure system. We can decide whether we want to do research that answers puzzles or to do research that fills gaps in the literature.

As scientists, we have an obligation to engage in research that answers tough questions, clarifies puzzles, and produces knowledge that solves problems. I do not mean to be cynical, but research is not a tool to advance our own careers. The goal of doing research is to find answers and create knowledge that exerts a positive impact. Scholars should take their responsibility for research that addresses an abundance of social problems threatening our welfare: disease, global warming, violence, corruption, abusive supervision – endless social problems begging for greater understanding. I once thought that reordering the promotion and tenure system could solve our current situation. I now believe that we have the solution: if every scholar were to work only on research that really matters, the field would change. Journals would have to publish our work because they can publish only the papers that are submitted.

The good news is that this change is not as hard as it seems. It requires only two decisions. The first is the choice of topics. Do we go to the literature or to the world around us to look for problems that deserve our research attention? The second is choosing where to do the research. Do we stay in our offices or do we go to our research site to better understand the problem that we are trying to solve? This means moving from “insulated research” to “engaged research.” I would like to ask any scholar, “Are you insulated from the object of your study or are you engaged with it?”

Of course, I must also acknowledge the value of the ivory tower. When we need to think deeply, when we are struggling to make sense of volumes of data – quantitative or qualitative – we need the seclusion of our offices, within the walls of the sacred universities. We need to divorce ourselves from the pragmatic concerns of the people or firms and abstract deeper theories from the operational details.

I believe and hope such decisions and actions will improve the quality and the ultimate value of our research, in any context. Learning the technique of how to do high quality research in any context is relatively easy once you understand the goal of research. Starting the research with the right purpose, you will know that you cannot blindly apply an existing theory or measure. You will know to contextualize the theory and the ideas. Your purpose will not be “how do I get this paper published” but “how do I obtain a true understanding of this problem and offer a new and valid answer?”

You have written about the powerful role of guanxi in Chinese life, work, and culture. What is guanxi? What is the difference between the Chinese notion of guanxi and the American notions of social networks or relationship? How does guanxi fit the new structural needs of capitalism?

A fairly large body of literature is being built on the Chinese version of social networks or social networking, which is captured by the Chinese term guanxi. Management and Organization Review (MOR) has published two excellent reviews on this topic. The first, called “Guanxi and organizational performance: a meta-analysis” (Luo et al., 2012), is a meta-analysis at the firm level. The second, “Chinese guanxi: an integrative review and new directions for future research” (Chen et al., 2013), is a comprehensive qualitative review at all levels that also explains the differences and similarities between guanxi and social networks.

Debate continues as to whether guanxi is still important or has lost importance now that modern China has better-developed formal institutions and increased rule of law. Guanxi’s role is not primarily instrumental – and it will become less important in this role as formal institutions are better developed. Guanxi also has an expressive function as a cultural institution that is both independent of and has stronger sustaining power than formal institutions. This is still a rich area for research.

As the nation transitions from a planned to a market economy, and given the uncertainty and ambiguity arising from China’s changing legal system and institutional norms, how do Chinese leaders and managers build interpersonal relationships and trust, and why should they do so?

As I mentioned, guanxi is both instrumental and expressive. It relates to how people identify themselves. In a relation-based society, guanxi, or particular forms of relationship, will always be important. My article, “where guanxi matters: relational demography and guanxi in the Chinese context,” in Work and Occupations (Tsui and Farh, 1997) includes a good discussion of why guanxi is embedded deeply in Chinese culture. Guanxi, as part of the Chinese cultural fabric for more than 2,000 years, will always be important in China. Just as social networking is part of Western culture, guanxi is the Chinese way of deciding who is a friend, who is a mere acquaintance, who is trustworthy, who is not. Formal institutions will not replace the need for trustworthy and dependable personal relationships for socio-emotional support, or when the formal system fails, for instrumental support.

You have also looked at the dynamics of guanxi in Chinese high-tech firms through the lens of three different relationship types. To me, it shows the complexity of guanxi – at least to the Western viewer. What are these three types? What are the implications for Chinese firms?

Fu, Dess, and I discussed this question in the paper, “The dynamics of guanxi in Chinese high-tech organizations: implications for knowledge management and decision-making” (Fu et al., 2006, IMR). We used resource-and knowledge-based views as well as social network theory to explore guanxi dynamics in the context of Chinese entrepreneurial high-technology firms. We showed that guanxi relationships can occur among qinren (family members or quasi-family members), shuren (familiar people), and shengren (strangers with ties yet-to-be-discovered). We explain the role of each type of guanxi at different stages of the development of entrepreneurial high-tech firms. However, it is a conceptual the paper, so I hesitate to draw managerial implications from the ideas it included. The predictions in the framework must be tested.

In your 2012 AOM presidential address, you presented numerous examples of worldwide suffering and presented examples of organizations taking compassionate actions and research centers studying compassion. Why do we need to bring care and compassion into our organizations, societies, and work? Why has it been missing?

Some answers to your questions are in the paper “On compassionate scholarship: why should we care?” (Tsui, 2013) which is based on the presidential address and will be published in the April 2013 issue of the Academy of Management Review. I am pleased to elaborate a bit more.

The lack of compassion in research must not be confused with the need to be “objective” in scientific inquiry. We can and should study the topic of compassion objectively and scientifically. True scientists have compassion. Albert Einstein, in one of my favorite quotes, said “Concern for making life better for ordinary humans must be the chief objective of science” (Isaacson, 2008, p. 374). Compassion underlies all science. It is our misunderstanding of both compassion and science that has led to the prevalent dispassion in management research.

We cannot blame dispassion or single focus on firm performance as the major goal of management research on Milton Friedman. Although he emphasized that firms should focus on economic objectives and that for-profit businesses should leave philanthropy to private individuals, he did not say that firms must be harsh to employees or customers to make profits. His philosophy was that corporations fulfill their corporate responsibility by maximizing profitability – engaging in activities that detract from shareholders’ wealth is socially irresponsible.

The study of business and management, however, is multidisciplinary. As early management scientists discovered, organizations are not only economic entities; they also have psychological and sociological contexts. People are both rational and social beings. They react not only to physical conditions and economic incentives; they also have socio-emotional needs that deserve recognition and satisfaction. Bringing care and compassion into organizations, therefore, can be both humanly meaningful and economically beneficial. In fact, many theories, such as social exchange, motivation, and leadership, explain why employees and teams respond to supportive supervision or positive human resource systems with higher performance and strong commitment.

This lack of attention to compassion as a research topic is illustrated in the leading American journal – Academy of Management Journal (AMJ) as reported in a paper by Walsh et al. (2003). This is also found in three leading Chinese journals, as revealed in an analysis my colleague and I did recently for an editorial in Management and Organization Review (MOR) (Tsui and Jia, 2013). The stage of economic development does not fully explain why economic logic dominates a society’s business activities and research interests. We expected and found that AMJ would publish more social welfare topics than would the Chinese journals. Indeed, in the past thirty years, 82 percent of AMJ articles were devoted to economic performance and 21 percent were devoted to human welfare topics, which compared with a 94 percent/7 percent ratio in the three Chinese journals. However, one can also ask whether research conducted in a developed context – such as the USA – should be devoting 80 percent of its focus to economics and only 20 percent to human welfare. If the purpose of science is to improve the human condition, should not we be doing more research on how firms can be managed to maximize benefits to both shareholders and stakeholders? Should not we expect to see an equal proportion of research devoted to economic and social objectives?

How do you define care? How do you define compassion?

Compassion refers to an affective state and a broad class of emotional and behavioral responses that motivate people to want to help when they witness suffering. Compassion is closely associated with sympathy, kindness, tenderness, warmth, caring, or love in word categorization studies. I prefer Sprecher and Fehr’s (2005) definition of compassion:

Compassionate love is an attitude toward other[s], either close others or strangers or all of humanity; containing feelings, cognitions, and behaviors that are focused on caring, concern, tenderness, and an orientation toward support, helping, and understanding the other[s], particularly when the other[s] is [are] perceived to be suffering or in need.

I use the words compassion and caring interchangeably. Rather than treating compassion as a passive response, I treat it as an active orientation toward the wellbeing of others who are in pain, stress, or undesirable conditions.

What led you to bring the themes of care and compassion into the Academy of Management, beginning with the 2010 meeting and through your speeches at IACMR and AOM 2012?

I described my rationale at the beginning of my AOM presidential address, and I am very glad that you asked this question. In early 2009 when I had to choose a theme for the 2010 Academy of Management meeting, I looked at the financial crises of 2008 and saw that people worldwide were suffering from the financial meltdown that eliminated millions of jobs, created many homeless families, and wiped out the retirement savings of innocent elderly people. The national unemployment rate doubled. The US Government was forced to bail out the banks and the auto industry and introduce a national rescue plan. Europe and Asia were affected as well, and recovery is still slow in developed economies such as Spain, Greece, and the USA. Simultaneously, business schools were facing criticism, both inside and outside academia, for the great divide between research and practice, for our failure to perform research that is relevant to the larger society, and for actually harming business practices. These criticisms implied that academia was no better than Wall Street in terms of caring beyond our self-interests. I proposed the theme, “Dare to care: passion and compassion in management research and practice” for the Academy’s 2010 annual meeting in Montreal because I wanted to challenge and invite us all to care more. I did not see much improvement after that, so I decided to focus on it again for my presidential address in 2012.

I am deeply passionate about the themes of care and compassion. I knew I wanted to do more in my own work, and I was hoping to motivate my colleagues to do the same. So I used my address to talk about the suffering that we see all over the world, in all societies. I praised examples of compassion research that are coming from institutions, universities, and corporations. And I challenged all of us in the Academy to ask: What does compassion mean for us? Why should we care?

How do we create more caring, compassionate, and sustainable leaders, scholars, and organizations?

Education is the key.

For example, we can reconsider MBA curriculums. Do they typically balance economic, psychology, and sociology courses? Arrunada and Vazquez (2013), two scholars in Spain, have written an article that has been conditionally accepted at MOR and will be published in 2013. The article reports their analysis of the core curriculums of the world’s top 100 business schools, using graduates’ salaries as a criterion for success. The results support the value of balanced MBA curriculums that include courses grounded in psychology and sociology rather than curriculums dominated by economics and analytical skills.

The authors reason that balanced curriculums – utilizing content and teaching methods that expose students to alternative psychological and sociological models of human motivation and that complement the analytical skills of economic training – teach students to discriminate transactional frameworks and better prepare them for leadership. The authors further argue that economic-oriented curriculums train good analysts, whereas balanced curriculums train good managers. Curriculums that expose MBAs to humanity’s diverse nature beyond self-interest and to multiple perspectives enable them to make more balanced decisions than those MBAs trained in only the economics paradigm.

A caring organization is a function of its leadership. When managers have compassion, they are likely to make decisions that aim to maximize welfare for all stakeholders and not only shareholders. They are less likely to make decisions that maximize economic payoff at the expense of human wellbeing.

Many years ago, AT&T researchers studied ways to predict successful leaders. Two results particularly stand out. Successful leaders are behaviorally flexible and have liberal arts college backgrounds, which means that they were exposed to alternative perspectives and understand the balance between self-interest and community-interest. We must educate our current and future leaders about history, humanity, science, art, philosophy, and theology. Human beings are highly varied. Not all are self-interested, but only a few are saints. Most of us are somewhere in between. This means that we can think beyond ourselves and appreciate the needs or qualities of others. Even economic experiments have proven that cooperation outdoes competition in achieving joint gains.

Education is the key, for all ages. Learning will make us wiser and more sustainable.

Can we, and should we, contextualize our understanding of care in China and in other countries and cultures? Like Chen did with his work on materialistic and socioeconomic rewards in China vs the USA?

Whether compassion and caring is contextual would be a fascinating cross-cultural study. How do people in different cultures express care and compassion, at work and outside of work? What do organizations do to express their caring for employees in different cultures? I would love to see such research.

What key questions require further research and study with respect to care in cross-cultural management?

As I mentioned, caring and its expression may or may not differ cross-culturally. We can draw insight from the fields of psychology, sociology, and anthropology. Do organizations in different societies have different types or different degrees of caring for their employees, customers, suppliers, or the community? Why do some nations have more legislation for corporate governance that gives more power to employees, such as Germany, while other countries are moving further away from employee protection; for example, why the decline of unions in the USA? How much of the differences are because of culture, stage of economic development, or political systems? Are there some universal truths about caring and compassion? This line of inquiry is interesting and important.

Do you wish to communicate anything else to the community of scholars and practitioners in cross-cultural management?

The world is growing increasingly smaller as people worldwide are becoming easily connected by MSN, Skype, Facebook, YouTube, or e-mail. Virtual teams are increasingly dominating the corporate, academic, and research worlds. As developing countries catch up technologically, economically, and socially, cross-border activities and collaborations will multiply. This should be the golden age of cross-cultural management practice and research.

All managers, wherever they work, should have a copy of Cross-Cultural Management: An International Journal (CCM). CCM has the opportunity and obligation to conduct research that is highly relevant to practice – rather than research that aims to fill a gap in the literature. I hope CCM researchers will keep focused on their ultimate purpose to generate knowledge that can inform and improve practice. Even fundamental research should turn to an orientation that increases the intrinsic value of research and provides researchers with a deeper purpose. Only then will research contribute to the public good rather than to private wealth only. In fact, ideal scientists look beyond their personal benefits and devote themselves, instead, to the beneficiaries of their research.

This quote summarizes my message: “Scholarship has to prove its worth not on its own terms, but by its service to the nation and to the world” (Oscar Handlin, quoted in Boyer, 1996).