Suchergebnisse

Preface; Contributors; Section 1 Information Technology in Asia: The Role of Hong Kong as a Regional and Global Hub; 1. Hong Kong as a Hub for Regional and International Business; 2. IT Policies and Information Infrastructures: Comparing Hong Kong to the Singapore Model; 3. Hong Kong's Communication Infrastructure: The Evolving Role of a Regional Information Hub; 4. Electronic Commerce and EDI in Asia; Section 2 Practices, Problems and Productivity in Hong Kong; 5. The Use of Information Technology: Practices and Problems; 6. IT Manpower Issues in Hong Kong

Employee empowerment is commonly a fundamental part of the prescriptions offered to improve business performance. However, business process improvement and many other organisational development and change initiatives tend to encapsulate the values of the societies and organisations in which they were developed – and such values are not universal. The case of a business process re‐engineering project in Hong Kong illustrates an attempt to empower team members that paradoxically resulted in their psychological enslavement. The roles of cultural differences and reward systems in producing unintended consequences are analysed while the implications of the case for both research and practice are considered.

After the rapid and dramatic demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, 15
newly autonomous republics are restructuring their economies after
decades of central Communist planning. The three Baltic states of
Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia had successful market‐oriented economies
during more than two decades of independence between World Wars I and II
and were comparatively strong performers within the USSR after being
occupied in 1940. A case study of Latvia looks at the historic factors
and political issues which are shaping the current reform process. A
contrast of state‐run, collective and private enterprises is used to
illustrate the rapid changes which now place Latvia at the forefront
among post‐Soviet reformers. This analysis of the early progress and
problems forms a foundation for considering the reform prospects across
the former Soviet Union and leads to a suggestion that the results in
Latvia will play a bell‐wether role.

This article contributes to international theory development by examining organizational change (OC) in mainland China. Eight case studies of a single type of OC, business process re-engineering (BPR), reveal that Chinese organizations diverged consistently from initially planned changes. Change context is found to influence not only the process of change, but also the content and even the objectives of change. Since specific practices carry implicit values, the congruence with existing values influences OC implementation significantly. Multinational organizations must recognize that a specific practice or policy can represent very different changes in different contexts.

Despite remarkable advances in information technology (IT), many computer-based information systems (IS) still fall short of performance expectations. A growing share of these implementation failures are due to nontechnical factors. This article considers the human factors and human resource (HR) management issues associated with IT assimilation. A taxonomy of specialist roles in the IS adoption process is proposed and illustrated in a series of brief case studies. The results from a field investigation are then reported. The relationships between different HR specialist roles and selected IS success measures were examined in more than 60 organizations across East and Southeast Asia. Proactive and supportive HR roles were found to be associated with greater user satisfaction, smoother organizational change and improved productivity, but did not significantly affect perceived output quality. The implications for management practice are discussed and specific areas for further research are identified.