Special issue on expats and citizens: managing diverse teams in the Middle East

Citation

(2009), "Special issue on expats and citizens: managing diverse teams in the Middle East", Team Performance Management, Vol. 15 No. 7/8. https://doi.org/10.1108/tpm.2009.13515gaa.001

Special issue on expats and citizens: managing diverse teams in the Middle East

Article Type: Call for papers From: Team Performance Management, Volume 22, Issue 7/8

Team Performance Management will publish a special issue in August 2010 on ``Expats and citizens: managing diverse teams in the Middle East''. It will be guest-edited by Dr Ingo Forstenlechner of the College of Business and Economics, United Arab Emirates University (UAEU).

The Middle East - and countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) in particular -- hold unique challenges for both strategic and line management. A heavy dependence on an expatriate workforce has created a highly diverse workforce, while management of the local workforce poses very unique challenges. This special issue aims to investigate the management of teams at the intersection of those two groups.

While there are, as Wes (2007) or Cordesman (2002) state, serious difficulties in getting reliable empirical information or statistical data for the region, the last reasonably reliable numbers put the average percentage of expatriates across the GCC at 37.1 per cent and at 81 per cent in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), 70 per cent in Qatar and 64.4 per cent in Kuwait (Kapiszewski, 2006) and it is likely that their share has grown rather than decreased since. On the other side of the equation, that of the local workforce, Wes (2007, p. 141) considers workforce nationalization a question of survival: ``The ability to develop effective solutions will be a major factor in the survival of the governments and maybe even for the continued existence of the GCC countries in their present form''. Rees et al. (2007), Mellahi (2007) as well as Budhwar and Mellahi (2006) argue that localization programmes in the Middle East are severely underrepresented in scholarly literature.

The combination of these two developments poses unique challenges for management. This special issue particularly invites papers exploring the relationship between expatriates and host-country citizens and the implications for performance.

Conceptual papers, empirical papers, and case studies are welcomed on, but not restricted to, the following themes, related to team management and performance:

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  Managing diverse teams in the Middle East;

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  Intergroup relations in the Middle East;

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  Management of independent expatriates within teams;

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  Management of host country citizens within teams;

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  Implications of labour nationalization policies for teams; and

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  Managing teams during localization.

Submission requirements

Manuscripts should be between 4,000 and 6,000 words in length, should include a structured abstract and should be set out in the format requested in the journal's Author Guidelines (see: www.emeraldinsight.com/info/journals/tpm/notes.jsp). Submissions should be innovative papers not currently being considered for publication elsewhere.

All papers will be double-blind refereed through a peer review process.

Full paper submissions are requested by e-mail attachment directly to: Dr Forstenlechner at ingo@uaeu.ac.ae The deadline for full paper submissions is 10 December 2009.

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