Liber Amicorum - TiasNimbas Business School

Managers onderwIjzen: een agenda voor ManageMent opleIders.
Continental Europe. Americans value individual behavior and performance above
the performance of a group or team. Europeans on the contrary attach considerable
importance to group performance and collective responsibility. In Continental
Europe people in general accept that solidarity with the underprivileged is a collective
responsibility. In the United States it is left to the individual initiative to show
solidarity through the channel of philanthropy. European companies will therefore
be more ‘society minded’ than their American counterparts and societal concerns
will have relatively more weight in decision-making of European as compared
to American companies.
In Europe young graduates increasingly look at the presence of societal concerns
in the management of the companies they consider for employment. An increasing
number of young people no longer want to work for a company that is too exclusively
aiming at maximizing shareholder value.
Type of industry
In some industries one can still get away with only pursuing economic value creation.
Recent history has shown this to be the case in the financial services industry.
In other industries such as, for example, aircraft manufacturing this is no longer
possible. The pressure to build lighter aircraft, consuming significantly less fuel
has become an absolute must. The pressure comes from society at large in terms
of reducing CO2 emissions. But also from airlines who want to see their energy
bills reduced. The Boeing 787 Dreamliner is a case in point.
Stage of development
In emerging markets, primary physical needs (in a Maslowian sense) remain to a
large extent unmet. Parents are willing to let their (even young) children work because
without it they cannot feed their families. In other words, minimum conditions
of human welfare have to be met before improving longer term welfare and
well-being become relevant.
In wealthy economies such as those of Western Europe, well-being has become so
dominant that economic value creation becomes ever more difficult. This can of
course become unsustainable. Examples are the enormous delays –sometimes for
over a decade- in highly needed road infrastructure works. The delays result from
excessive environmental pressure, where local negative environmental impact can
get precedence even if global environmental impact gets reduced. This has, for example,
been the case in a long time dispute concerning the mobility in the Antwerp
region in Belgium.
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