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Human Resources Management in Emerging Markets and by Emerging Market Firms

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Becoming an International Manager

Part of the book series: Contributions to Management Science ((MANAGEMENT SC.))

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Abstract

How successful emerging market firms are in their internationalisation to either other emerging or developed markets largely depends on their staffing practices. Emerging market firms face several challenges both domestically and internationally in this respect. The chapter highlights some of these challenges, including the lack of skilled employees in emerging markets, short internationalisation history and inexperience in internationalisation at firm and individual levels, limited opportunities for indirect learning about internationalisation, a negative country of origin image and the related domestic and international employee recruitment and retention issues. It also briefly addresses how these challenges are reflected in emerging market firms’ international staffing practices, such as putting the focus on local talent recruitment process or searching for alternative international staffing practices to address the deficiencies in domestic and international labour markets.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See also the findings from the pilot interviews presented in Chap. 4 and 5. Illustrative quotes can be found in Sect. 13.6.

  2. 2.

    I classify Slovenia as a small emerging market economy based on both its size and lack of political power combined with the poor quality of institutions in the country, its political instability, and its regional affiliation to Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the related emerging market country image rather than economic indicators of the level of development in a country (see also GlobalEconomy.com; Gov.si; Jaklič et al. 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018; Meyer and Peng 2016).

  3. 3.

    Slovenian MNEs, for example, mostly send one or two persons to foreign units [in 2016, 49.5% of all assigning firms—regardless of their size; sent one or two assignees abroad: more than a quarter of these were sent on multiple assignments (own calculations based on unpublished data by Health Insurance Institute of Slovenia for 2016)]. They rely on local staff for the rest of the posts and tasks.

  4. 4.

    Developed market firms, on the other hand, may wish to establish a stronger parent-country national presence for control or coordination and knowledge transfer purposes in the (perceived as) riskier markets (see e.g. Tung 1982).

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  1. Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia

    Iris Koleša

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Koleša, I. (2021). Human Resources Management in Emerging Markets and by Emerging Market Firms. In: Becoming an International Manager. Contributions to Management Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87395-0_3

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