Managing Sustainable Development through Cross-Cultural Management: Implications for Multinational Enterprises in Developing Countries

This chapter discusses how multinational enterprises (MNEs) use their existing employees in the workplace as intermediaries, to influence local community stakeholder attitudes and behaviours during the implementation of sustainable development initiatives in communities, with the aim of shedding some light on the complexities of managing sustainable development challenges in developing countries. We illustrate how employees who are part of the community can influence local communities in corporate social responsibility issues (CSR). The majority of employees in our case studies come from the local communities where MNEs operate. We present a case of MNEs from an emerging market, South Africa, and an MNE from a developed nation that engages in extractive mining activities in East Africa, and illustrate how mining MNEs use sustainable development initiatives (e.g. CSR) to influence the attention, attitudes and behaviours of employees, both at work and within their communities where MNEs operate. Our unit of analysis in this study is the organization (e.g. the MNEs) and how it prioritizes relations with various stakeholders during CSR implementation (Husted and Allen, 2006). We use the resource dependency and institutional theories to explain the relevance application of stakeholder orientation utilized by MNEs towards local communities.