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Previous studies have examined the impact of gender on training opportunities, but only within the context of Western societies. This study explores the effect of gender on access to company training in Taiwanese high‐tech firms. It finds that although males enjoy a slight advantage over females in obtaining training, there are no significant gender‐based differences. Females in Taiwan appeared to be more successful in accessing company training than their counterparts in the USA and the UK. Higher labour‐market status is offered as a potential reason for such relative success. Consistent with human capital theory, a direct relationship is found to exist between seniority and the probability of receiving training.

Succession planning concerns the selection of talented employees to replace senior managers who leave the firm because of retirement, reassignment, or other reasons. Effective succession planning emphasizes minimizing disruption and dislocation arising from such personnel changes, with a view to implementing business strategy and achieving organizational goals in a smooth and continuous manner. Although succession planning is an essential requirement for the long‐term development and success of business enterprises, previous studies have rarely investigated the empirical relationship between succession programs and human resource outcomes. This study employs empirical data collected from business firms in Taiwan to address that question.

To determine whether training programs produce real benefits for small and medium‐size enterprises (SMEs), we must investigate the relationships between those programs and their effects on the business performance of SMEs. Although a number of previous studies have attempted to accomplish this task, serious inadequacies, such as inconsistent definitions of training and “rough” methods of training classification and measurement, have raised doubts about the validity of their findings. To remedy these inadequacies and more accurately assess the relationships between training and training effectiveness, this study employs a comprehensive measurement of training including training organization, expenditure, duration, process, and delivery methods. Its findings show that firms with sophisticated training systems and strong management support for training are most successful at maximizing the effectiveness of their training programs.

Previous studies suggest that strategic human resource management (SHRM) is beneficial to firm performance. This study seeks to investigate the moderating effect of product market strategy (PMS), one of the contextual factors, on the relationship between SHRM and firm performance.

This study conducted a survey on 235 Taiwanese firms and hierarchical regression analysis was performed.

The results failed to support the “universalistic” SHRM perspective. Only the interaction between an innovative PMS and SHRM exerted a significant effect on firm performance, which supporting the argument of the “contingency” perspective. The findings of this study confirmed the validity of the contingency model in an Asian society.

Different from most previous studies conducted in a Western context, this study examined the data of Taiwan, and thus examined a very different cultural and institutional environment. Although this study obtained valuable results, the limitations of the subjective data, number of measurement items and the cross‐sectional design were discussed. In a future study, more work on revealing the influence of other unexplored factors to better understand the determinants of firm performance should be done.

Coping with innovation needs, the degree to which traditional human resource management (THRM) is transformed into SHRM determines how well a firm is able to sustain and enhance growth. This will enable firms to keep pace with the rapid environmental changes associated with globalization.

Investigates the moderating effect of PMS on the relationship between SHRM and firm performance in a Taiwanese context.

Contingency theory holds that human resource management methods are selected in accordance with the type of competitive strategy adopted by a business. It moreover assumes that companies that closely coordinate their business strategy and HRM activities achieve better performance than companies that do not. This study attempts to examine the interactive effects of various combinations of business and HRM strategies from the standpoint of contingency theory. The conclusions are based on an analysis of questionnaires completed by 315 local firms in Taiwan. The results show that different business and HRM strategy combinations have different effects on organizational performance. However, these differences were not always consistent with the predictions of contingency theory.

Although numerous studies have investigated wage‐level determinants, they have tended to concentrate on the effects of human capital and sex discrimination on wage levels while rarely addressing the interactive effects of education, seniority, and gender. This paper attempts to redress that imbalance. The results of this study show that gender and education have a strongly positive and interactive effect on income. If all other factors (e.g. years of service, job position) are held constant, then higher education leads to an increase in the wages of both males and females. However, above the junior‐college level, more education produces a larger increase in the wage rate for females than for males. The implication is that, although males have been seen to benefit from the impact of additional education on wages, more education for females may still help narrow the gender‐based wage gap.

Any organization can only be as strong as the collective strengths of the individuals within the set‐up. As statements of the obvious go, that must rank pretty high. It follows, of course, that sustaining that strength through succession planning should be of prime importance to companies which want to stay ahead of the game. Good senior managers, the people who bring out the best in those individuals, move on or retire. If the corporate machine is to remain well oiled and highly effective, successors must be people of at least equal calibre.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the reliability and factor structure of the Arabic translation of the Emotional Intelligence Scale (EIS‐41‐A), a popular trait‐based emotional intelligence test in Arab countries.

A sample of 453 professionals from Egypt, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the UAE completed the EIS‐41‐A.

Findings show that the Arabic scale did have acceptable reliability and demonstrated the same factor structure as the original English language scale.

Limitations of the study include the small sample size from some of the countries included.

This is the first paper to investigate the characteristics of an Arabic language emotional intelligence scale and opens the door to further research on emotional intelligence in the Arab world.