As organizations increasingly fulfil their customer needs by getting their work done globally, there is a pressing need for the scientific community to further advance knowledge on global work, especially in terms of how to better conceptualize and integrate it. A particular opportunity for such development involves the cross-fertilization between the International Business (IB) and Human Resource Management (HRM) literatures, which serve as the focal domains to study global work phenomena, but have treated global work largely as separate research streams. We therefore edited a special issue to contribute to a more integrative understanding of various aspects of global work across both domains. In this opening article, we review existing research on global work in the MNE from both IB and HRM perspectives.Subsequently, we present a shared conceptualization of global work that helps integrate theoretical and empirical research in both fields. We then introduce the articles in this special issue, before developing an integrative agenda for future research on global work.

One aspect of person-job fit reflects congruence between personal preferences and job design; as congruence increases so should satisfaction. We hypothesized that power distance would moderate whether fit is related to satisfaction with degree of job formalization. We obtained measures of job-formalization, fit and satisfaction, as well as organizational commitment from employees (n = 772) in a multinational firm with subsidiaries in six countries. Confirming previous findings, individuals from low power-distance cultures were most satisfied with increasing fit. However, the extent to which individuals from high power-distance cultures were satisfied did not necessarily depend on increasing fit, but mostly on whether the degree of formalization received was congruent to cultural norms. Irrespective of culture, satisfaction with formalization predicted a broad measure of organizational commitment. Apart from our novel extension of fit theory, we show how moderation can be tested in the context of polynomial response surface regression and how specific hypotheses can be tested regarding different points on the response surface.

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Drawing on theories of generalized exchange and the norm of indirect reciprocity, we conceptualize subordinates’ organizational citizenship behavior directed toward the organization (OCBO) and directed toward peers (OCBI) as antecedents of managerial trustworthy behavior and examine how managers’ affective trust in subordinates mediates this relationship. We also investigate the extent to which this mediation is moderated by the level of collectivism in a society. Data were collected from 741 managers and 2,111 subordinates in 18 countries representing all major cultural regions of the world. We find support for our hypothesized moderated mediation in that managers’ affective trust in subordinates mediates the relationships between both subordinates’ OCBO and managerial trustworthy behavior, and subordinates’ OCBI and managerial trustworthy behavior across the different countries studied. Further, managers’ affective trust in subordinates only mediates the relationships between both types of citizenship behavior and managerial trustworthy behavior when collectivism is low to medium but not when it is high. Implications for research on cross‐cultural psychology, trust, and organizational citizenship behavior are discussed.

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