Local isomorphism constitutes the regulatory, cognitive and normative profile of a host country. The regulatory institutional setting reflects the rules and legislation governing collective bargaining agreements, trade unions, local content laws and employment relationships. The cultural or cognitive dimension supports the widely held cultural and social knowledge and the normative profile acknowledges the influences of social groups and organizations on acceptable normative behaviour. Earlier literature lends support to the importance of institutional profile and its influence on the design and implementation of multinational enterprises’ human resource management policies and practices. This paper seeks to advance the concept of local isomorphism and highlight the implications of local isomorphism for future research on the transfer of multinational enterprises’ human resource management practices across and between subsidiaries.

The motivation of employees is one of the main reasons why companies define mission statements and other declarations of commitment to the company’s stakeholders. Research on organizational behavior has identified three main types of motivation: extrinsic, intrinsic and prosocial motivation. However, the three forms of motivation have hardly ever been considered together, nor has it been studied which motivation is linked to the stakeholders of business companies. The main contribution of this paper is to present an agent-stakeholders model of interaction which includes and integrates extrinsic, intrinsic and pro-stakeholders motivation, as a type of prosocial motivation related to the sense of contribution to benefitting the company’s stakeholders. By basing the research on 119 Spanish companies it is verified that the three types of motivation are present in employee motivation. This finding has implications for management, as it presents the dimensions of the motivational task to be performed by managers.

Researchers have disagreed recurrently over the years concerning the nature of continuance commitment as developed within the Meyer and Allen paradigm, specifically whether continuance commitment consists of ‘high sacrifices’ and ‘low alternatives’ subdimensions. To address this, Edward's analytical strategy was used to examine continuance commitment as having superordinate, aggregate, or multivariate structural forms. Results suggest that (1) continuance commitment is not a multidimensional construct, (2) that the ‘high sacrifices’ subscale alone taps continuance commitment, and (3) the ‘low alternatives’ subscale measures neither continuance commitment nor perceived employment alternatives. Implications for further exploration of the continuance commitment construct are discussed.