Yitzhak Fried and his colleagues received the 2019 Robert J. House Best Research Paper Award.
Yitzhak Fried, Trinity Professor of Management in the Jerry S. Rawls College of Business, received the 2019 GLOBE (Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness) Robert J. House Best Research Paper Award.
The award, which is sponsored by Victoria's Peter B. Gustavson School of Business, honors an outstanding recent dissertation-based article/paper, or any other published paper on leadership, societal or organizational culture using the GLOBE database, GLOBE research tools, GLOBE leadership or GLOBE culture theory.
The GLOBE Research Project is dedicated to exploring differences in countries' cultures and their effects on organizations. GLOBE provides managers a lens through which they can better understand how to perform well in an international environment.
"I am honored to receive this prestigious international award, which promotes sustainable development through global research and innovation," said Fried.
Selected by a distinguished, international committee, the winning paper, "Locals know best? Subsidiary HR autonomy and subsidiary performance" as featured in the Journal of World Business (2017), was co-authored by Mila Lazarova, an associate professor at Simon Fraser University in Canada and Hilla Peretz, a senior faculty member at ORT Braude College in Israel.
"As stated by the letter from the award committee, this year there was an exceptionally high-quality pool of submissions, which further emphasizes the contribution of our study," said Fried.
The paper examined the effect of independent decision making related to human resource policies and practices by subsidiary companies. Together with his team, Fried found, across 373 multinational corporation (MNC) subsidiaries in 12 countries, that allowing subsidiaries to determine their own human resource management practices, independent of headquarters, is associated with lower employee absenteeism and higher subsidiary performance.
"Given the important role MNCs play in our global economy, our study provides important
and timely findings that can serve both scholars and practitioners," said Fried.
He believes that the study has important implications for how human resource management
responsibilities should be implemented in subsidiaries of MNCs.
"Our findings suggest that enabling subsidiaries to organize their HRM practices contributes to lower employee absenteeism and higher subsidiary performance."
Fried added that this is also somewhat complex because the results of their study further indicate that the effect of subsidiary human resource autonomy on absenteeism is stronger when cultural and institutional distance between headquarters and subsidiary country is low.
Similarly, according to the team's research, the effect of subsidiary human resource autonomy on performance is stronger when the institutional distance between headquarters and subsidiary country is also low.
"It would be beneficial for MNCs to systematically examine all their human resource practices to determine the appropriate balance of control versus coordination with subsidiaries," said Fried.