Abstract
International business activities have to take place across a variety of languages, cultures and legal jurisdictions and in each location, a firm requires a cost-effective labour force. Secondly, managerial and technical jobs in foreign locations have to be competently staffed for international strategies to be achieved. This means that decisions are required about which key jobs are to be staffed by personnel from the home country or personnel from other countries, and which products will be produced in the home country or produced from other sources. These challenges for human resource management must be met in the context of a rapidly changing international environment.
Global or transnational companies constantly examine the performance of international operations and can switch to any other location (or supplier) which offers more competitive costs. Many firms have no sense of obligation to create or retain jobs and wealth in any particular country (even in the home country). Employment of labour and careers of managers and technical staff in any part of the world can disappear quickly if cost analysis shows that better quality or lower cost operations can be obtained in one location compared to another.
Global firms also have special problems of communications and coordination of operations across diverse geographical and cultural regions. To cope with these problems, such firms are also obliged to invest further in HRM to improve coordination and comminication. In general, coordination mechanisms can take two forms: formal procedures and external controls on managerial actions, or the development of international networks among managers. A complicating factor for international communications is the existence of significant cross-cultural differences in managerial values and practices. To achieve coordination and consistency, a global firm either has to have a strong program of socialisation of new employees from different cultures into the dominant culture of the firm, or must try to select employees from various cultures who already have a predisposition toward the values of the firm. Otherwise, the firm may have to accept the possibility that management practices within the firm may be quite different in different parts of the world.
The principal conclusions in this chapter are that many important philosophical or ethical issues exist for companies as they try to maximise economic returns while managing international human resources. In the pursuit of economic competitiveness, decisions are made which may eliminate careers of managers and sectors of employment in one part of the world while creating careers and employment in other parts. Even employees in the home country of the firm are not safe from the effects of these decisions if the firm adopts a truly global perspective for business decisions.
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© 1991 Physica-Verlag
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Ondrack, D. (1991). Strategic Issues in International Human Resource Management. In: Lattmann, C., Staffelbach, B., Gerpott, T.J., Norek, C. (eds) Die Personalfunktion der Unternehmung im Spannungsfeld von Humanität und wirtschaftlicher Rationalität. Management Forum. Physica-Verlag HD. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-48220-5_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-48220-5_13
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