Managing organization and business in Asia

Asian countries present an exciting business opportunities for organizations across the globe as they offer varied socio-economic canvas to local, national and global firms to be an integral part of Asia’s growth story (Budhwar et al., 2018; Purkayastha et al., 2017; Singh and Gaur, 2018). At the same time, we witness huge variations in the structural and cultural context in Asia, as it covers countries from being underdeveloped to those that possess potential to emerge as world superpower. As a result, internal organizational architecture and business strategies that work best in the western world need to be reconfigured and implemented to suit well with high-context Asian culture (Kaur et al., 2019; Popli et al., 2016). The firms need to demonstrate capability to analyze the context-specific nature of HRM in the region (Budhwar et al., 2018; Singh et al., 2019a, 2019b), while combining global integration and national responsiveness (Singh et al., 2019a, 2019b) across the Asian continent. Furthermore, the rise of China and India as emerging global power centers has led to a shift of the balance of power from Europe and the USA to Asia (De Guzman et al., 2011) and many multinational enterprises (MNEs) have made Asia as their operational base. Therefore, the aforementioned literature on business, organization is significant. Asia suggests for the utmost need to examine and understand them in much detail to successfully manage business and organization in Asian continent. It is in this context, we believe that the papers published in this special issue on “Managing organization and business in Asia” is a sincere attempt to fill in the existing gap in the literature and set up future research directions.

The first paper, titled “CSR in the Lebanese banking sector: a neo-institutional approach to stakeholders’ legitimacy” is contextualized in Lebanese context (CITE the study). The study suggests that maximizing the shareholder value is critical, as it symbolizes firms’ intentions of being socially responsible and that the firms should stay put with such a kind of CSR strategy. This study also suggests that firms religiously communicate with their shareholders in a manner to attain their trust and make a further push to CSR strategy.

The second paper, titled “The impact of patient recovery flexibility on service experience in public healthcare” explains the relevance of patient recovery flexibility vis-à-vis experiences related to varied services to the patients and their attendants in the public health-care organization (CITE the study). Furthermore, the paper suggests that public health-care organizations should engage in service innovation to create experiential value to their customers.

The next paper titled “Transformational leadership style, followership, and factors of employees’ reactions towards organizational change” is on a contemporary topic, as it deals with emerging issues at workplace (CITE the study). The paper suggests the linkages among leadership style, followership in the context of managing organizational change, and at the same time set direction for future research in this domain.

The penultimate paper titled “Workplace spirituality and employee loyalty: an empirical investigation among Indian millennials” explains how workplace spirituality influences loyalty at workplace (CITE the study). This paper suggests theoretical and practical implications on how organization should handle their millennials’ human resources to unleash their potential for excellence at the workplace.

Finally, the last paper titled “Expatriate assignments: the ‘same’ job may require different tasks” advances literature in the context of expatriate management and international human resource management (CITE the study). At the same time, this paper throws several directions for future researches on the management of both self-initiated and organizationally assigned expatriates in a diverse cross-cultural context.

We hope that the special issue on “Managing organization and business in Asia” provides varied and deep insights and throw agenda for future researches.