This article reviews the organizational values, recruitment, and reward policies of Brazilian samba schools and Indian dabbawalas to illustrate how their fi t to local cultures results in greater productivity, engagement, and low turnover. American-style management has spread worldwide, yet in emerging market countries such as India and Brazil, multinationals often struggle to motivate and engage their employees. The companies' top ranks in these countries are usually dominated by English-speaking, university-educated elites who are comfortable with Western management techniques. But these managers can be, as the Comprador class was in seventeenth-century China, strangers in their own land, implementing management techniques that feel foreign and inappropriate to their employees.The result is often low productivity, absenteeism, and unhappiness. However, there are organizations in both India and Brazil that achieve staggeringly high productivity and consistently strong engagement PRACTITIONER ARTICLE
To remain competitive, organizations must make sense of antecedent weak signals that might yield information on opportunities or threats. However, perceiving those signals requires psychological capabilities which are not evenly distributed over their workforce. Identifying who might effectively sense weak antecedent signals is the necessary first step in the staff selection and management process. To this effect, Human Resources Management processes at organizations rely on assessments. However, this study suggests that some self-assessments might be too context-sensitive to fit their purpose across cultures. In particular, the CEI-II evaluation applied to a small and convenience sample of Brazilian executives did not satisfy Brazilian respondents’ selection for curiosity. The authors briefly discuss how the Brazilian context may differ, not least because of a considerably lower generalized trust level, and suggest relying alternatively on projective instruments.
The drivers for the internationalization of business teaching and research were multinational corporations, the Cold War, and the relative price advantage of non‐America business schools. Yet, the internationalization largely failed to reflect local contexts. The consequent paucity of original local business thought, international or not, exposes non‐American business schools to the raid of American‐based massive open online courses which will prune off the mainstay courses at emerging market business schools. Deprived of a substantial share of their fee‐paying students, the remaining docents at those schools will be less likely to publish altogether, including in fields that might sustain independent thought. Therefore, American‐like international business research is likely to have a longer life, more narrowly focused on English‐speaking countries and Europe, with even less of a contribution from emerging markets.
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