The benevolent cycle in which loyal employees beget loyal customers beget greater profits has been laid out convincingly by such luminaries as Frederick Reichheld (“The Loyalty Effect”) and James Heskett, W. Earl Sasser and Leonard Schlesinger (“The Service Profit Chain”). But can managers engaged in global businesses assume that the phenomenon seen in the United States applies in the rest of the world? And if so, what creates individual employee loyalty across the great diversity encountered in varied national labor markets? After all, we have all heard that siestas are a must in Spain and that no self-respecting French person works in August. Can we ever hope to make all our employees —whatever their nationalities — feel well-treated and therefore loyal?The question has been answered in a landmark global study conducted by Walker Information Global Network, an Indianapolis-based international partnership that addresses stakeholder issues, and the Hudson Institute, a public-policy organization specializing in work-force research. More than 9,700 full- and part-time employees representing business, nonprofit and government organizations in 32 countries and regions as varied as the United States, Bolivia, Finland and Hong Kong participated in the survey.
