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Training programs designed to enhance managerial effectiveness at cross‐cultural communication tend to be directed at specific target cultures. This paper argues that an etic approach, one based on universal variables that occur in every culture and that vary across cultures, comprises an important alternative. This paper reviews anthropological/sociolinguistic research on one universal variable, “politeness.” Politeness, or linguistic indirection used to show social consideration, is a crucial element of interpersonal communication in all human cultures, yet it has received little mention in the literature. Implications of politeness for managerial cross‐cultural communication are explored. The implications of a universalistic approach to cross‐cultural communication training are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between status-leveling symbols (i.e. the symbols used by organizations to remove, blur, or downplay hierarchical distinctions) and employees’ work attitudes, as mediated through perceptions of trust, justice, and leader-member exchange. The study intends to provide some empirical support relative to the role of symbolic-leveling symbols as a social influence process in the workplace.

In this study, the authors developed a measure of organizational status leveling by focussing on three symbols – physical space, dress, and forms of address. Data were collected from 147 employees who were enrolled in a part-time MBA program. The paper used path analysis to test the hypotheses.

Results fully supported the theoretical model except the mediating role of justice perceptions in the relationship between status-leveling symbols and affective commitment.

The results of the study provide guidance for design of physical workspaces and setting or reinforcing norms regarding forms of address and dress codes. Such practices need to be integrated with other high-involvement HR practices so as to create and sustain the culture desired by the organization.

The paper is the first to measure status-leveling symbols in organizations, and the first to investigate the linkages between symbolic-leveling symbols and relevant work-related outcomes.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the programs of status leveling – such as through the elimination of executive washrooms, reserved parking, and so forth – are a taken‐for‐granted feature of many workplace involvement and quality improvement programs, yet no prior research has investigated the presumed effects.

This conceptual paper enumerates devices commonly used to level status in organizations, and presents a number of propositions intended to capture the major effects. The paper draws on extant literatures from social psychology, sociology, and organizational theory to account for processes and effects of leveling.

Leveling devices lead to several proximate outcomes: increased cross‐status interaction and contact, literal blurring of status, role flexibility, and low power distance perceptions. These in turn mediate the relation between leveling and several broader organizational outcomes, including distributive justice based upon equality, community, communication, and empowerment. Factors moderating the effects of leveling are explored.

While the salutary effects of leveling tend to be taken for granted, it is possible to specify how leveling generates specific behavioral, attitudinal, and performance related outcomes. The model should be empirically tested.

The findings provide managers with a fine‐grained understanding of this important set of organizational practices.

No prior scholarship has focused on this most important topic.

The purpose is to show how actors' relative power or parity is dynamically instanced in discrete speech behaviors that are exchanged throughout everyday organizational interaction.

Politeness theory, rooted in the dramaturgical theories of Erving Goffman, details a set of linguistic indices used to show regard for others' face. This conceptual paper draws on politeness theory to model the unfolding of power relations within face-to-face verbal interchange in organizations. The paper presents a number of propositions suggesting how power differentials (or parity) are reflected in a set of common speech behaviors used to defray threats to face throughout organizational interaction.

This article extends and applies politeness theory to organizations by exploring specific motives and linguistic outcomes of high and low power actors, describing the behavioral egalitarianism associated with organic organizations, and suggesting how the demand characteristics of face-to-face interaction create oligarchic tendencies that militate against the success of workplace participation. Politeness' role in the social construction of power, and in distortive processes within hierarchical communication, is also discussed.

This paper enables researchers to understand the specific linguistic features associated with power-related roles, and it shows how the social distribution of certain speech behaviors is a function of power and dependency relations.

The findings provide managers a fine-grained understanding of how power affects speech, and an understanding of how such speech patterns may stymie attempts to stimulate organizational empowerment and employee voice.

Prior scholarship has neglected this most important topic.

The purpose of this study is to test whether equity theory (ET) – which posits that individuals compare their outcome/input ratio to the ratio of a “comparison other” and classify individuals as Benevolent, Equity Sensity, and Entitled – applies to the modern workplace of global virtual teams (GVT), where work is mostly intellectual, geographically dispersed and online, making individual effort nearly impossible to observe directly.

Using a sample of 1,343 GVTs comprised 6,347 individuals from 137 countries, this study tests three ET’s predictions in the GVT context: a negative, linear relationship between Benevolents’ perceptions of equity and job satisfaction in GVTs; an inverted U-shaped relationship between Equity Sensitives’ perceptions of equity and job satisfaction in GVTs; and a positive, linear relationship between Entitleds’ perceptions of equity and job satisfaction in GVTs.

Although the second prediction of ET is supported, the first and third have statistically significant opposite signs.

The research has important ramifications for management studies in explaining differences in organizational behavior in GVTs as opposed to traditional work settings.

The authors conclude that the main novelty with ET in GVTs is that GVTs are an environment stingy with satisfaction for “takers” (Entitleds) and generous in satisfaction for “givers” (Benevolents).

This opening chapter introduces key debates in relation to informality in policymaking, laying the theoretical and conceptual groundwork for the individual empirical chapters, beginning with a provocation for how informality can alternatively be understood. Through illustrating where gaps in understanding within current literature exist for how informality acquires meaning, and the physical and material relevance for how it manifests across contexts, this chapter introduces the three thematic clusters that thread through the book’s chapters: boundaries, knowledge mastery and networks. In doing so, it briefly positions each chapter in relation to these flexible and overlapping categories, drawing attention to how each chapter presents a different understanding of informality. Key to this chapter is our contention that while informality escapes definition, without binary or fixed conceptualisations of this concept we are better able to take in its fluidity and envisage how it is interwoven in everyday policy work and its human and non-human enactment. Underpinning this contention is a key contribution of this work, a proposition for a re-conceptualising of informality and formality as in|formality. Methodologically, this chapter argues that informality is better ‘shown’ than ‘told’ – and that this can be achieved through interpretive and socio-material approaches woven through disciplines that foreground narrative, ethnographic and creative approaches to research.

From an online survey of 114 participating accountants at staff, senior staff, and supervisor levels from a top-100 U.S. accounting firm, we investigate the effects of the Big Five personality traits (Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Extraversion, Neuroticism, and Openness) on the ethical decision-making process of accountants. Within the framework of Rest’s (1986) Four-Component Model of Ethical Behavior, we focus on Component III, the formation of an intention to act upon one’s best ethical judgment. Based on the limited extant literature on the connection between personality and ethical behavior, we expect that accountants high in Conscientiousness and Openness will tend to form an intention to act ethically despite pressure in an ethical dilemma. We develop more tentative hypotheses about the remaining three factors. Controlling for age, gender, education, sole earning status, and experience, we find clear positive statistical effects of only Conscientiousness and Openness. These findings have implications for the human resource departments of accounting firms, as well as contributing to a basic understanding of the relationships between Big Five personality factors and ethical intention.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how an Urban Facilities Management (Urban FM) focused summer school in Norway in 2019 impacted knowledge creation, as well as the host and foreign educators, along with the international student participants.

This paper’s data collection is formed as a “post-event study” using interviews and a quantitative survey from both the students and educators to look at the impact of the summer school on the student and the associated educational programs.

The outcomes of this study indicate that the impact on educators and their educational programs was substantial with regard to their teaching experiences. The study confirmed that foreign experience allowed not just for greater potential for cross institution cooperation for the future but also allowed for the usage of the summer school case studies in host and guest educational programs. For the students, the added value was in the international experience primarily and a chance to study on a case study project. The study was also successful in the dissemination of Urban FM knowledge.

This paper also offers added theoretical value in the development of a model in future projects on how to capitalize on the potential impact of the summer school on educators and students. The possibilities for increased dissemination and knowledge creation in Urban FM is also significant.