I explored the impact of human resource management (HRM) practices or simply management practices on performance by taking into consideration national culture among other contextual factors, based on evidence from Japan and the United States. I built the hypotheses on the relationships between management practices and performance, drawing not only on the perspectives commonly used so far in the strategic human resource management (SHRM) literature, namely the universalistic and contingency ones, but also on knowledge and insights from cross-cultural research. Then, I empirically tested the hypotheses, using questionnaires returned from 241 and 120 production teams of Japan and the U.S., respectively. I confirmed the effect of relevant management practices on manufacturing performance among production teams from two countries as the universalistic or convergence perspective predicts. I also captured the moderating effect of national culture on the relationships between management practices and performance, proving the efficacy of the cross-cultural perspective in conducting SHRM research across countries. This research makes some theoretical contributions. First of all, it makes a contribution to the development of a new research domain of international SHRM because I conducted this research in an effort to answer the call from some scholars to conduct SHRM research in the international setting. Second, this research makes a theoretical contribution to comparative HRM studies and cross-cultural research in that it revealed that not only can differences in national culture explain divergence in management practices, they can also determine the relations between management practices and performance.
