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The purpose of this paper is to present, analyze and discuss the case of AT&S, Europe's largest and most technologically advanced producer of printed circuit boards and one of the most successful Austrian‐based global players..

The paper focuses on the company's strategy and its global integration, its structure in terms of decentralisation, its organizational culture, and how the corporate approach towards knowledge management and cross‐site knowledge transfer is attuned to these premises. The paper encoded nine qualitative, semi‐structured interviews with top managers of the Austrian headquarters and two subsidiaries in Asia according to a system of categories and integrated the results for three interviews per site to an assessment on unit level. Then the three units were again merged and combined to an analysis on the company level.

Discussing the knowledge flows among the three sites and also the mechanisms of knowledge transfer across organizational and national borders at AT&S, the paper concludes that high‐tech companies do not need knowledge management to be successful.

Path dependencies of international case studies might reduce transferability of results to other industries or national cultures.

A focus on centralized product development and a supportive management information system guarantees global leadership and the capturing of benefits from subsidiaries in different markets.

This comprehensive case study shows that high‐tech companies do not necessarily require an elaborate knowledge management system, because the expertise transferred is built in the products.

The labour turnover rate is in general 10 per cent in China. Although this rate is especially high for blue collar workers, fluctuation among qualified employees and managers is high as well. As a result, the economic development has led to high competition on the Chinese market. Moreover, companies also have to deal with lack of employees – especially highly qualified ones. The purpose of this paper is to figure out the impact of fringe benefits on the labour turnover rate of Chinese professionals.

The study subjects were 14 managers working for private companies in the Shanghai region. The authors conducted semi‐structured interviews as the primary data collection procedure to investigate reasons, opinions, and views about fringe benefits and employees' loyalty to their organisations.

The paper outlines highly diverse perspectives about fringe benefits. Furthermore, the authors show a series of reasons for labour turnover and motivators of Chinese professionals.

This paper contributes to the compensation literature by analyzing the relation between fringe benefits and loyalty of Chinese professionals. Moreover, it shows to what extent fringe benefits influence labour turnover in China. It also presents the preferred fringe benefits of employees in Chinese companies.

Most managers are heavily affected by the relationship between their professional and their private life. Work‐life‐balance is discussed rarely without discomfort, which suggests a massive tension and conflict caused by the contradiction of private and professional requirements. Managers use a range of individual strategies to deal with this conflict situation. An explorative empirical study on these strategies is presented.

The sample is drawn largely according to the principles of theoretical sampling, different family‐work constellations provide the basis of selection. Our sample includes people from the upper and highest levels of organizational hierarchies. Most of them have children and working partners, hence they find themselves in specific phases of the family cycle. Thirty problem‐focussed interviews are content analyzed. In order to reveal pattern of dealing with work‐life‐conflict cluster and pronominal analyses are applied.

Results show three distinct prototypes of dealing with the work‐family‐tension: career as subject of social fascination, family as a factual task, the tradition of two worlds, double burden and the pressure of tasks. One outstanding result in advance: if both partners are professionally active (Double Career Couples), the family will increasingly be dominated by merely functional requirements.

Explorative analyses and results are presented. The applied combination of content analysis and detailed linguistic procedures allows a new, more differentiated view on how managers perceive work‐life‐balance. Real types of handling work‐life‐conflicts are revealed. Based on these findings, more quantitative and structured analyses of managers' work‐life‐behavior can be conducted, especially on these types' overall prevalence, on changes in the course of managers' life cycle, on causal factors, and on implications for human resource management.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between organizational structure and performance, especially through organizational learning and innovation, based on evidence from Austria and China.

Based on the literature and hypothesis, a theoretical, conceptual and structural equation model is set up through a questionnaire survey and sample of about 90 Austrian and 71 Chinese samples. Partial least squares were used in the analysis and the results are tested by bootstrap methods.

The findings reinforce the important infrastructure position of organizational structure on performance. First, organizational structure has more effects on organizational learning than on innovation, organizational learning has an indirect effect on performance through innovation, except the direct effect of structure on performance. Second, managers in Austria think structure has a more important effect on performance; both managerial and technical innovation influence performance, managerial innovation is not significant in China. Austrian companies prefer structural‐oriented innovation whereas Chinese prefer learning‐oriented innovation. Third, in a hi‐technology or knowledge intensive industry, organizational structures affect organizational performance mainly through innovation and organizational learning. But in traditional industry, such as labor‐ or capital‐intensive industry, organizational structure impacts organizational performance mainly through innovation. Fourth, for younger firms, learning is important in the relationship of organizational structure with performance, but in older firms, innovation is the mediator for structure on performance. Finally, senior managers think organizational structure improves performance directly and through innovation. But the middle and junior managers think organizational learning has an important mediating effect on performance.

The paper shows that innovation is a more important mediating variable in the influence of organizational structure on performance. Innovation needs to be encouraged at the strategy level instead of at the implication level.

An improved investment environment and aggressive foreign direct investment (FDI) liberalization strategies have enabled Asian countries, such as Korea and Vietnam, to attract sharply increased FDI inflows and multinational corporations (MNCs) during the 1990s. Indonesia, however, has suffered from stagnated FDI inflows and, in particular, continued divestment since late 1998. In this paper, we report the survey results of recent changes in attitudes toward foreign MNCs perceived by government officials and business leaders in these three Asian countries, and investigate the major individual attribute determinants of their assessment of foreign investments using econometric tools. We also discuss policy implications of these findings for host‐country FDI policy makers and the international business community.

The purpose of this study paper is to identify and prioritize the factors affecting the knowledge flow in high-tech industries.

This research is applied in terms of purpose and descriptive-survey in terms of data collection method. This research has been done in a qualitative–quantitative method. In the qualitative part, due to the nature of the data in this study, expert interviews have been used. The sample studied in this research includes 35 managers and expert professors with experience in the field of knowledge management working in universities and high-tech industries who have been selected by the method of snowball. In the quantitative part, the questionnaire tool and DANP multivariate decision-making method have been used.

In this study, a multicriteria decision-making technique using a combination of DEMATEL and ANP (DANP) was used to identify and prioritize the factors affecting the knowledge flow in high-tech industries. In this study, the factors affecting the knowledge flow, including 8 main factors and 31 subfactors, were selected. Human resources, organizational structure, organizational culture, knowledge communication, knowledge management tools, knowledge characteristics, laws, policies and regulations and financial resources were effective in improving knowledge flow, respectively.

By studying the research, it was found that the study area is limited, and the previous work has remained at the level of documentation and little practical use has been done. In previous research, the discussion of knowledge flow has not been very open, and doing incomplete work causes limited experiences and increases cost and time wastage, and parallel work may also occur. Therefore, to complete the knowledge management circle and fully achieve the research objectives, as well as to make available and transfer the experiences of people working in this field and also to save time and reduce costs, the contents and factors of previous models have been counted. It is designed for high-tech industries, a model for the flow of knowledge.

High‐flyers are a very important issue in organizations; however, the concept of high‐flyers is not clearly defined, nor are the assumptions behind this concept frequently discussed. Characterizes the high‐flyer concept through analysing popular notions in the German practitioners’ literature and analyses the ways organizations handle the high‐flyer issue. Finally, addresses the tacit assumptions and blind spots linked with this concept.

In contrast to the predictions from the family business and the small- and medium-sized enterprise internationalization literatures, Hidden Champions are world-market leaders exhibiting a high share of exports. The purpose of this study is to analyze their strategy of internationalization of Hidden Champions in Germany and find that the international success and strong, sustained performance emanates from their product type, enabling to successfully pursue a niche strategy for differentiated premium products.

The authors first conceptually explore how Hidden Champions pursue strategic internationalization, and then analyze a sample of N = 2,690 Hidden Champions to examine why Germany has been able to generate the highest per capita share of Hidden Champions in the world.

The study finds that on both a micro and macro level, the strong and sustained performance of Hidden Champions is driven by product type and quality strategies. Niche strategies for a knowledge-intensive, technological product enable the firm to lock-in customers. However, to safeguard the internalization of highly specific quasi-rents, Hidden Champions enter foreign markets through fully owned subsidiaries, retaining control and residual property rights. The second finding of this paper is that Germany has succeeded in deploying its high level of human capital into the Mittelstand through highly skilled workers.

Unfortunately, no micro-level panel data are available. Still macro-level data beginning in the nineteenth century provide strong empirical support for the hypothesized causality.

This is the first paper to link the strong and sustained export performance of Germany to the Hidden Champions by examining the origins of the German Mittelstand model, dating back to the social, political and economic developments of nineteenth century.