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Prior research demonstrates the importance of face in conflict situations. However, the direct relationship of face concerns to facework behaviors has limited empirical support. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate the relationships among self‐, other‐, and mutual‐face concern and 11 facework strategies within Chinese, Japanese, German, and USA national cultures in recalled conflict situations.

The study was conducted by administering a survey to 768 participants from China, Japan, Germany, and the USA who recalled a conflict situation. Participants completed a self‐report questionnaire about their attitudes and conflict behaviors during a recalled conflict. Regression analysis and comparisons of correlations were utilized to examine relationships between face concerns and facework across the four cultures.

The major findings are: other‐face is associated with remain calm, apologize, private discussion, giving in and pretend positively and express emotion negatively; self‐face is associated with defend positively; mutual‐face is associated with aggression negatively; associations among face concern and facework strategies have some cultural differences, but are largely consistent for the pan‐cultural relationships among face and facework.

Provides evidence that many of the face/facework relationships are consistent across cultures; uses self‐report questionnaires to operationalize attitudes and behaviors about conflict which are subject to self‐serving bias.

The findings are useful for scholars and practitioners interested in intercultural communication, negotiation, and conflict. The findings suggest that training participants about face concerns and facework may be fruitful for improving conflict management. Such training needs to consider cultural differences.

The research endeavor directly identifies what relationships exist between face concern and facework. The link was assumed but has limited empirical support and none cross‐culturally.

The purpose of this research paper is to investigate the role of individual and cultural differences, specifically religious motivation and attitudes toward nepotism, in the selection of conflict management styles (obliging, avoiding, forcing, integrating and compromising), in the Middle-Eastern context.

The research surveyed a sample of 588 individuals (both Muslims and Christians), representative of the Jordanian population. Data were analyzed through multiple ANOVAs and multiple regressions.

Results suggest that both religious motivation and attitude toward nepotism affect the choice of conflict management styles, while demographic variables, such as age and gender, do not seem to have an effect.

This paper constitutes one of the first attempts to investigate the conflict management style preferences of a Middle-Eastern society and the role of two important cultural variables, namely, religious motivation and attitudes toward nepotism, which have not been previously investigated by conflict management research.

This study aims to advance theory on business in conflict zones (often termed “business for peace”) so as to enable the categorization of empirical work testing the field’s assertions.

In this conceptual paper, the authors present an assessment framework for categorizing research on the peace impacts of business entities, as suggested by Oetzel et al. (2009). This framework allows researchers to make comparisons across methodologies and fields on whether particular business actions contribute to peace.

Drawing on peace and conflict research, this study proposes a three-stage process in response to the presence of violence and its level of intensity, identify applicable research methods to assess the impact of business actions on peace at each of the three stages and offer suggestions for future research.

Categorizing research impacts in the business for peace field will allow societal actors to evaluate the efficacy of claimed business for peace efforts. This is particularly true for those in within international organizations and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) who work with the private sector and for those in the private sector whose work attempts to enhance peace.

As a societal actor, business has a key role to play in peacemaking. The past decade has seen a proliferation of qualitative research work surrounding this theme. In a seminal work, Oetzel et al. (2009) suggested a research framework building on the theories of Fort and Schipani (2004) and suggested five actions that businesses could take to promote peace. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first one to respond to that suggestion by proposing a means of categorizing the impacts of business actions.

This paper aims to explore the ideas that social legitimacy (acceptance by the public within a country) serves as a hedge against political risk and that the perceived social value of Multinational Enterprises (MNEs’) products or services improves firms’ social legitimacy and so resilience to political shock.

Drawing from a unique data concerning global construction activity and taking advantage of the Arab Spring as an exogenous, political shock, this paper teases out the relative effects of pre-shock experience and product/service emphasis.

The authors find that construction firms that worked on a higher proportion of socially beneficial projects – such as water infrastructure, transportation and telecommunications – recovered more quickly from political shock than did those that worked on projects primarily for manufacturing interests or the oil industry. The authors also find that deep experience in a country had no bearing on a firm’s ability to recover from political shock.

The findings suggest that market behaviors that enhance social legitimacy also enhance MNEs’ ability to survive in volatile political settings. These insights add to the political risk and nonmarket strategy literatures the idea that market strategies that are attentive to nonmarket strategic goals are an important addition to the toolkit for managing political risk. More specifically, when it comes to surviving political shock, pre-shock emphasis on socially beneficial products seems to create a social legitimacy buffer that enhances resilience more than do deep country experience and associated social and political ties with the political elite.

Prevailing corporate culture coupled with affective trust in co-workers and affective organizational commitment may promote or hinder the tendency for people to share knowledge. This study aims to determine whether knowledge-sharing tendency varies from one form of organizational culture to another by examining the concurrent mediation of affective trust in co-workers and affective organizational commitment and provide insights for appropriate knowledge-sharing initiatives.

Adult learners (N = 408) enrolled in the MBA and MSc postgraduate programs at five private universities in Singapore participated in a two-part self-administered anonymous survey. Data were analyzed with SmartPLS partial-least squares structural equation modeling using a two-stage analytical technique that examined the measurement and structural models.

The concurrent effects of affective trust in co-workers and affective organizational commitment complementarily mediated the relationship of organizational culture on the knowledge-sharing tendency for adhocracy, clan and market cultures but fully mediated for hierarchy culture.

This study provides insights for managers to understand the characteristics of their organizational culture and choose appropriate practices for improving knowledge-sharing tendency among its employees.

A model is established to determine the type of organizational culture that facilitates knowledge-sharing tendency. It offers new theoretical insights into how and why affective trust in co-workers and affective organizational commitment impact the relationship of organizational culture on knowledge-sharing tendency. Understanding these relationships can provide valuable insights into various strategies for different organizational cultures to increase employees’ knowledge-sharing tendency.

This paper proposes locational ambidexterity as a location-specific factor based on an operation flexibility perspective, and explores why and how multinational corporations (MNCs) proactively deal with uncertainty by valuing locational ambidexterity in making location decisions.

Location choice data for foreign direct investment (FDI) at a sub-national level in China is used to test the role of locational ambidexterity.

We find that FDI generally prefers locations with high ambidexterity. Moreover, investments from a heterogeneous country context are more sensitive to locational ambidexterity than those from a similar country context. However, there is no significant evidence that wholly owned investments favor locational ambidexterity more than do international joint ventures.

An alternative operationalization of locational ambidexterity may be needed. Future research could explore the sources of locational ambidexterity, identify other firm- and industry-level factors that could alter the value of ambidexterity, investigate how MNCs integrate locational ambidexterity into organization-specific option creation strategies and test the ambidexterity perspective with micro-level location choice data.

Locational ambidexterity may reduce the overall risk and adjustment cost of future changes. FDI may choose a location with high ambidexterity, i.e. a balanced portfolio of location-specific determinants, under uncertainty about the future.

Drawing on the notion of location flexibility from Buckley and Casson (1998), this study identifies a new location character, locational ambidexterity, and proposes that MNCs address uncertainty by choosing ambidextrous locations that offer more flexibility for MNCs to change or respond to potential volatility. Selecting locations with high ambidexterity is thus an alternative and complement to the organization-specific flexibility creation strategies suggested by the literature on real option and flexibility.

Crises are often studied in international business (IB) research as the external “context” for business strategies, but firms can also be active participants in the unfolding of crises. The study of crises in IB could benefit greatly from studying the role of multinational enterprises (MNEs) as active participants, rather than as mere passive actors, responding to exogenous events. History shows that IB crises typically unfold partially as exogenous processes, and partly as the result of MNE strategies. A multilevel and longitudinal approach to studying crises in IB is clearly necessary. This chapter considers the extent to which smaller events that preceded the present crisis – since 1989 – point to systemic problems in global governance. It also defines five overlapping lenses through which future IB studies can further create relevant insights on how to deal with crises: historic, macro, meso, micro and exogenous. The chapter finally serves as an introduction to the whole Progress in International Business Research volume by indicating the relevance of all parts and chapters that follow.

Consistent with traditional internationalization theory, we argue that, when a firm chooses franchising to achieve market penetration, market propinquity/similarity matters. Using a modified gravity model, we examine six country characteristics believed to enhance the flow of franchise activity among 39 nations. Our findings support the notion that market propinquity facilitates the flow of franchises between nations. Franchise expansion is greatest when the home and host nations are similar in terms of geography, culture, media availability, and political risk. The management implications of these findings are discussed in detail.

This chapter seeks to conceptualize a new approach to the identification of the factors influencing the adoption of a political risk assessment (PRA) function. By making use of firm value maximization and risk aversion and considering the rationale for risk management activities, a number of determinants are identified which can be deployed in future PRA studies. A model for predicting the PRA adoption decision is proposed. Geographical contextualization in one or more emerging markets (EMs) provides a further dimension of originality as well as reflecting an increasingly important international business phenomenon. Political risk (PR) and political risk assessment (PRA) are of increasing importance in the context of the growth and development of emerging markets (EMs). The latter provide opportunities for inward investment from more developed economies. There has also been a rapid growth in outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) from emerging markets to other economies. This chapter adds to the current understanding of PRA by examining this issue in emerging markets (EMs) through the model developed here.