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Introduction
The 2020 pandemic is causing manufacturing firms to reopen the case for derisking single country-dependent supply chains, especially their manufacturing bases (Kawashima, 2020). Such diversification of manufacturing could be to locations within advanced economies such as USA or to emerging economies such as Thailand or India. Extant cross-cultural management theory (e.g. Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner, 2012) suggests that national-level cultural values vary and therefore human resource management (HRM) strategy also needs to be different to be successful in different markets (Malik et al., 2018; Oppong and Gold, 2016).
Related to the imperative for bespoke HRM strategy for the new location, management scholarship suggests that HRM strategy geared toward high employee engagement – defined as “the harnessing of organization members' selves to their work roles” (Kahn, 1990, p. 694) – is beneficial both for individuals as well as employing firms (Al-Musadieq et al., 2018; Bailey et al., 2017). Considered at the individual level, one important antecedent to individual job engagement is values congruence (Minbaeva et al., 2018; Rich et al., 2010). Meanwhile, examined at the firm level, Barrick et al. (2015) found that collective organizational engagement is impacted inter alia by motivating work design (MWD), namely core job dimensions such as variety, identity, significance, autonomy and feedback (cf. job characteristics model (JCM), Hackman and Oldham, 1976). The argument therefore develops that values at the individual level would influence what serves as MWD and further that since values differ across cultures – including across national cultures – what serves as MWD would potentially be different from one national setting to another (Erez, 2010; Saka, 2004). The study recognizes that culture at the national level does not translate completely to culture at the firm level, nevertheless study of culture at the national level is a reasonable proxy and further that organizational culture is heavily influenced by senior managers. Furthermore, the study recognizes that world cultural clusters can be a proxy for national cultures in terms of providing heuristics (Ronen and Shenkar, 2013) to guide international business decisions, including work design at overseas affiliates.
Extant engagement scholarship could also be diced across influence levels (Lysova et al., 2019): individual level (characteristics such as extroversion and intrinsic motivation); job level (facets such as...