Going Global Versus Staying Local: The Performance Management Dilemma in the International Context

The drive towards internationalization and the need to become successful across borders was already recognized by Perlmutter(1969) in his seminal work on the evolution of companies from ethnocentric to polycentric. However, over the last few decades, management theory has been dominated by an American bias with “one size fits all” solutions (Newman and Nollen, 1996, 753) and very little empirical research has focused on developing management systems which account for cultural differences (Jackson, 2002; Pollit, 2005).

Furthermore, management fads have been swinging from the one end of the spectrum to the other, with little or no attempt to integrate the best of both worlds
(Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner, 2012)