Multinational Corporations' Staffing Approaches in China

Essay by pepitaliangUniversity, Bachelor'sA-, November 2008

download word file, 7 pages 3.0

The significant improvement in communication technologies marked the arrival of the newmillennium. It is one of the most important innovations which shrunk the geographical distances between nations and redefined the physical boundaries of trade. According to Tye and Chen (2005), to cope with the changes of business environment, companies need to maintain their competitive advantage by operating on a global level. Globalization is no longer simply a trend but the norm in the world economy nowadays. To take advantage of the new global economy, companies are branching out around the world with offices and divisions in one or more countries. The growing economic interdependence of countries has proved to be beneficial as movement of labor force between nations resulted from such increasing global trade has expanded our geographical reach.

With the rise of the global economy, managing a global workforce becomes the greatest challenge to human resource management. International Human Resource Management (IHRM) is becoming increasingly important and needs to be integrated in a company’s strategy.

IHRM is about the management of human resources around the globe (Adler and Ghadar, 1990). Nowadays, companies can benefit from the access to a greater labour pool. Meanwhile, MNCs need to be aware of the local culture of the subsidiary employees. As the overall employment of the whole company is becoming more culturally diversified, formulating HR policies and practices proved to be a challenge for a lot of companies due to the different cultural contexts.

Companies can incorporated one of the three approaches into their international strategy, which influences the way they manage and staff their subsidiaries (Francesco and Gold, 1998; Treven, 2000):1. EthnocentricWith this approach, key decisions are made at the headquarters in the home country and the management practices from the home country are transferred to the subsidiaries. To ensure consistency of...