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The media often portray business organizations as warring enemies who define their own success by the demise of their competitors. Executives sometimes use similar imagery to motivate their “troops.” What such images ignore are the strong interdependencies among business organizations and the degree to which cooperation results in mutual gains. Just as nations have discovered the benefits of economic cooperation, businesses have learned that success often depends on forming strategic alliances.

The paper examines research fronts in the areas of innovation and human resource management (HRM), specifically integrates them and offers potential for interesting, exciting and important research for scholars in the People's Republic of China and around the world. The paper aims to identify those roles and encourage researchers to consider pursuing them in Chinese HRM research.

The paper takes the form of a literature review.

It appears that virtually all countries and firms around the world today want to and need to become more innovative. Fortunately there are many aspects of HRM that can play important roles in fostering and facilitating innovation. The paper identifies a number of critical areas for research on the topic of Chinese HRM and innovation. These include HRM policies and practices clusters, types of innovation strategies and goals, organizational design, ownership types, stages of innovation, intervening mechanisms, and cultural differences. Associated methodological approaches are also critical to fruitful research.

This essay presents research opportunities and related complexity in investigating Chinese HRM and innovation on a number of research fronts.

The purpose of this paper is to examine team external learning, particularly focusing on: how leader external learning behavior affects team external learning; how team external learning influences employee creativity; and whether team internal learning is a moderator between the cross‐level relationship of external learning and employee creativity in Chinese R&D teams.

Survey questionnaire were administered to a sample of 80 R&D teams comprising 331 employees from three medium‐sized Chinese high‐tech companies. HLM was used to test cross‐level relationships.

The paper hypothesizes that: leader external learning positively influences team external learning; team external learning leads to employee creativity; and team internal learning moderates the relationship between team external learning and employee creativity. Results support hypotheses 2 and 3, but not hypothesis 1. In addition, leader external learning is found to positively influence employee creativity.

This study has implications for both team leaders and top management. Although the context of this study is in Chinese R&D teams, all those teams facing similar environment to R&D teams can also learn from this study. There are several interesting implications for scholars who are studying teams, creativity and innovation.

Combining fields of team learning, boundary spanning, creativity and leadership, the paper addresses the following four questions, and provides further insights to the area of team external learning: First, what is the cross level relationship between team external learning and employee creativity? Second, is internal learning a moderator on the relationship between team external learning and employee creativity in R&D project teams? Third, is leader external learning behavior one of antecedents of team external learning? Fourth, is there anything unique about team external learning in Chinese culture? The paper provides research evidence for each of these questions.

This paper explores the issue of transferring western human resource management (HRM) practices to Algeria. Drawing on a case study of a large industrial company, the research identifies the motives for the transfer and examines the selection and implementation process of western HRM practices in Algeria. Evidence generated from the case study reveals that while management justifications for the transfer of western HRM practices capture the economic and technical rationale for western HRM practices, they fail to identify local conditions under which these HRM practices might be transferred. The applicability of western HRM is hindered by the unplanned and haphazard importation of western HRM practices.

We have all had experience with the stress caused by an increase in library technology—CD‐ROMs with different user interfaces, online catalogs with different command structures than our CD‐ROMs, and still different protocols for accessing remote databases. Yet, can you imagine the stress that can result from a crash of a local bibliographic and circulation database? I can—because it happened to me.

“Is there reason to believe that top management might be receptive to dramatically expanded HRM involvement in decision making? Yes, because intense competition and unprecedented environmental changes, particularly in the last two years, have irreversibly changed the way successful businesses must be run… Therefore, top management… should support a new vision of the HRM function, especially a vision that enhances corporate performance.” (Anderson & Fenton, 1993:73)

The paper explores the role of the strategic partner in the Management Development (MD) process at Jordan Telecom (JT) by surveying the attitudes of 243 Jordanian managers and by testing the relevant hypothesis. The findings reveals that the strategic partner contributes to the development of Jordanian managers' skills in areas such as time management, performance appraisal, job design and communications and cooperation. A limited significant impact of relevant demographic and managerial factors on managers' attitudes towards their MD and strong corelational relationships among MD dimensions are also revealed through the findings. The conclusions highlight the positive outcomes and implications of the strategic partnership at JT. The recommendations emphasized the need for further partnerships in Jordan because of their influential effects on Jordanian businesses.

Ineffective expatriate performance and premature returns have been found to relate primarily to an inability to adjust to the foreign environment rather than a lack of technical competence. Research has identified three dimensions of expatriate adjustment: adjustment to work, adjustment to interactions with people in the foreign country and general adjustment to the culture and living conditions. Five major factors that have been found to influence these dimensions of adjustment and research using these factors provides a framework to help international firms understand and take a more active role in facilitating expatriate adjustment.

In recent years, organisations around the world have been seriously affected by a range of economic, political and social upheavals that have gathered momentum in most parts of the globe. The viability of the conventional (pyramidal) organisational structures is being challenged in conjunction with major shifts in the roles of mid and top managers. In many countries, the pace of the above socio‐economic events and uncertainties is happening at an unprecedented pace. Some markets are showing signs of potential gigantic expansions while others (historically prosperous) are on the verge of complete collapse (Dent, 1991). In responding to the socio‐economic challenges of the nineties, organisations (across the board) have resorted to dismantling the conventional pyramidal structure and adopting so‐called “leaner” structures (see Zeffane, 1992). The most common struggle has been to maintain market share in an economic environment increasingly characterised by excess labour supply (Bamber, 1990; Green & Macdonald, 1991). As organisations shifted their strategies from “mass production” to “post‐fordism” (see, for example Kern and Schumann, 1987), there has been a significant tendency to emphasise flexibility of both capital and labour in order to cater for the niche markets which are claimed to be rapidly emerging, world‐wide. This has resulted in massive organisational restructuring world‐wide.