International Human Resource Management-MJ Version

managers and staff at lower levels of the organization than was previously
required (e.g. Cameron, 1994; Freeman, 1994). This may well give the impres-
sion that there is participative management. Yet because of the diversity of
interests in organizations in many emerging countries, participative manage-
ment may only arise through the active empowerment of all such interest
groups. ‘Empowerment’ may be seen cynically as a means to get a manager to
take on more responsibility with fewer resources and for the same money in a
period of organizational downsizing. The concept of empowerment must also
stretch out to the community. In African societies, as in many communalistic
societies, the barriers between community life and organizational life must be
broken down in order to provide a context for commitment and motivation of
the workforce.

Obtaining commitment and motivation

There is an indication of a lack of commitment to the organization by
employees as we have seen in the context of Africa (Blunt and Jones, 1992).
Corporations in Japan have been successful in harnessing the wider societal
collectivism to corporate life, in order to foster commitment by employees in
a reciprocal relationship with the corporation. Corporations in most other col-
lectivistic societies (typically ‘developing’ societies) have failed to do this, and
this is mostly due to the legacies of colonial institutions and their failure to
integrate with their host societies.
The way a corporation pays attention to employee commitment and moti-
vation through integrating the links between corporation and community, the
bringing in of different stakeholder interests and the regard for its people, is
driven by its management systems: that is its principles, policies and practices.
These systems are culturally influenced through a mixture of post-colonial,
Western (and perhaps Eastern) and African inputs. The likelihood of the
management of these inputs in hybrid systems of management being adaptive
rather than maladaptive to their context may depend to a large extent on
managers’ abilities to recognize and articulate these cultural influences. In order
to achieve this, there is a need to maintain a high level of awareness of the con-
tributing factors to the way the organization is managed through principles,
policies and practices, and their appropriateness to the socio-cultural contexts
within which the organization operates.

Assessing the appropriateness

of management techniques

The concern discussed above was that there is an apparent antithesis between
Western and non-Western ideas of organization and management; between an
idea of people as a resource (human resource management) and people with a

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