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ABSTRACT Recent economic developments and changes in international trade relations are increasing the population of multinational firms. This trend calls for a greater understanding of how work values differ across national borders. Existing writings have devoted little attention to the comparative work values of Pacific Rim countries, focusing instead on how broad dimensions of national culture differ in that region. Thus, drawing from an array of literature on national cultures and business environments in the Pacific Rim, we develop a set of propositions suggesting how US, Chinese, and Mexican workers compare with respect to five work values: job activity preference, attitude toward earnings, attitude toward promotion, co-worker involvement preference, and vertical job involvement preference. We then extend our discussion of work values to develop propositions about the relative effectiveness of HRM practices-including decentralised decision making, individual financial incentives, merit-based promotions, and social gatherings-in the US, China, and Mexico.
Introduction
If the rapid growth of the global economy continues, increasingly we will be dealing with work values of other cultures.1
Recent economic growth in Asia and the passage of NAFTA are prompting a large number of companies to enter overseas business ventures (Moffett, 1992; Shaw & Meier, 1994; Griffith, 1995). A key factor determining the success or failure of such ventures is international human resource management. As Nam (1995, p. 554) has pointed out:
IJV [international joint venture] performance is largely affected by the ability to manage human resources in multicultural contexts. The growing popularity, the substantial failure rate and the cultural complexity of IJVs suggest that a closer examination of human resource issues is required. (Shenkar & Zeira, 1987)
All too often, managers assume that human resource management (HRM) practices used in their country will be equally effective in other countries, only to find that employees abroad have different work values and, hence, do not have the expected response to those practices. Managers involved in US-China, US-Mexico, or China-Mexico business ventures can therefore benefit from learning how work values in the US, China, and Mexico differ and the implications of those work value differences for HRM in each country. In response to this managerial need, the popular press, drawing largely from anecdotal and case study evidence, has swiftly generated a number of writings...