Most schools and departments of education have behavioural expectations of their students. The degree to which the individual teacher has a say over how they run their class can differ widely. In some contexts, it is completely left up to the teacher to decide the best way to manage student behaviour. In other schools, all teachers will be required to follow the exact same procedures, right down to scripting language of what to say in certain situations. Most schools sit somewhere in the middle, where they will have a school-wide approach to promote consistency, but the running of the classroom is left to the professionalism of the teacher.

School-wide approaches differ in their underlying philosophy and research base. This chapter will examine four common approaches that are used in Australian schools and analyse them in terms of their potential for increasing student engagement.

Communicating Across Cultures – Bridging and Integrating. Bridging and integrating are, respectively, the second and third stages of the Map-Bridge-Integrate (MBI) model. There are three skills important to effective communication in a cross-cultural setting: engaging, decentering, and recentering. The three skills help improve all communication anywhere. An important theme is that mindful global leadership requires taking account of the context of the interaction. In interactions within a single culture, people generally operate with the same set of background assumptions often without people even being aware that they are doing so. The more culturally diverse the setting, the more difficult it is to recognize the assumptions, and the more explicit they should be. Although there are many ways that cross-cultural interaction can go wrong, they tend to fall into two basic patterns: destroying and equalizing. Much cross-cultural communication happens over email, chat, phone, video call, or other technology. Virtual communication is addressed.

High-Performing Global Teams. Most work in organizations today is done in teams. Teams in international management are highly complex, and leaders and members of international teams must start by excelling at the basics of teamwork. These basics include the team’s desired design including composition and roles, team processes and climate (task, interpersonal, learning, psychological safety, trust, cohesion), and outcomes. Global teams additionally have two elements that tend to affect their operations: culturally diverse composition and geographically distributed environment. Teams must be adept at leveraging diversity and collaborating virtually. They must interact to create value from the diversity and not destroy that value. Working virtually, they must maximize their effectiveness by ensuring they match the complexity of their communication with richness of the media that they use.

In late 2017, the US economy was nearing full employment. Unemployment was at a 40-year low of 4.2%, yet President Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress embarked upon a policy of tax cuts. The Federal Reserve, seeking to avoid overheating the economy, tightened monetary policy, raising interest rates. In other words, the two policies were working in opposite directions. The dollar rose in value, making US exports more expensive to foreigners, making imports cheaper to Americans, and thus worsening the trade deficit. How and why these events played out motivates the development of the model in this chapter.

For as long as people have roamed the earth, there has been a fear of strangers. The term xenophobia comes from Ancient Greek and combines xeno (meaning foreign or alien) and phobia (meaning fear). In particular, it is common for natives of a country – whether today or in the distant past – to worry about immigration, especially illegal immigration.

In the previous chapters, we dealt with general problems by first formulating all necessary constraints and then passing the problem to an LO or MILO solver, but in a way, we have been oblivious to the problem’s structure. However, it is often advantageous to analyze this structure, as it can enable us to find better solution methods. In this chapter, we consider a very general class of problems with special structure – the network problems. In the following example, we illustrate the key ideas.

The distribution of the world’s natural resources is highly unequal. Norway is blessed with an abundance of oil, making it among the richest countries in the world, whereas its equally cold neighbor Finland has to live by its wits without such resources. Much of Algeria and Namibia is arid desert, whereas Brazil and Indonesia are lush and tropical. Chile is loaded with copper and Australia with iron ore and coal, while South Korea and Bangladesh are bereft of any natural resources.

Welcome to International Management Behavior: Global and Sustainable Leadership, ninth edition!

This book is not just a book about global business. It is about people who conduct business – and manage other types of organizations – in a global environment. It discusses and explores typical situations that managers encounter: the problems and opportunities; the frustrations and rewards; the successes and failures; the decisions they must make and the actions they must take.

International management is not an impersonal activity, and it should not be studied solely in an impersonal way. It is important to understand trade theories, to be able to weigh the pros and cons of exporting versus licensing, or to understand the advantages of a joint venture versus a wholly owned subsidiary. But eventually theory must give way to practice; strategizing and debating alternatives must give way to action. Working globally means interacting with colleagues, customers, and suppliers from other countries to achieve a specific outcome. We focus on these interactions, on getting things done with and through other people in an international context.

In the first part of this chapter, we examine how to measure the size and composition of the overall economy. We use these methods to see how saving and investment levels imply how much will be loaned to or borrowed from the rest of the world. Then we define in greater detail the nature of the trade and financial links between the economy and the rest of the world economy. At the end, we discuss how borrowing from the rest of the world affects the status of a country as a net debtor or creditor.

In Chapter 5, we claimed that the watershed between easy and difficult problems is their convexity status. Convex optimization problems are, however, a very broad class and one of their downsides is that the dual problem is not always readily available; see the discussion in Section 5.3. In view of the computational benefits of concurrently solving the primal and dual problems, a natural question arises: Is there a subclass of convex optimization problems that are expressive enough to model relevant real-life problems and, at the same time, allow us for a systematic derivation of the dual akin to linear optimization?