Global Human Resource Management Flashcards
Exam 3 (8 cards)
What are staffing policies?
Staffing policies in international business refer to the strategies companies use to decide who they hire to work in their overseas operations—including what mix of local employees, home-country employees, or third-country nationals they use.
What is the ethnocentric approach?
With an ethnocentric approach, a company fills key management positions in its foreign subsidiaries mostly with employees from its home country (the country where the company is headquartered).
Why companies use it:
They want to keep tight control over foreign operations.
They believe home-country managers understand the company’s culture, practices, and goals best.
It helps maintain consistency across all locations.
Example:
A U.S.-based company opening a branch in Germany sends mostly American managers to run the German office instead of hiring local Germans for those roles.
Advantages for ethnocentric approach
Lack of qualified managers in the
host market
* Ability to maintain a unified
corporate culture across
multinational operations
* Makes it easier to transfer core
competencies
* HQ can maintain tighter control over
key functions (e.g., R&D, Finance)
What is the Polycentric Approach?
Benefits/ Advantages for approach
A preference for placing host-country nationals
in management positions in the host country
Cultural and market understanding
* Especially useful for market-
seeking subsidiaries, and
subsidiaries in industries that
are highly regulated by host
governments
* Lower costs than maintaining
foreign managers in a host country
What is the Geocentric Approach?
Advantages / Benefits
Seeks to place the best people in
key jobs across the multinational, regardless of their
nationality
This approach allows
companies to identify
expatriate managers based
upon their functional skills
(e.g., marketing, leadership,
finance, etc.) and the nature
of the foreign subsidiary
(e.g., market seeking,
production, etc).
Placing them in optimal positions
Ability for the multinational to build a group of culturally literate executives
what is the regiocentric approach?
arguments for:
Regiocentric Approach: Seeks to select managers
from within a host country’s geographic region.
ex;A European company might have operations in France, Germany, and Italy. Instead of sending only people from the headquarters (say, in France), it might also appoint a German or Italian manager to lead a team in another European country.
Approximate cultural and market
understanding in managers
* Some ability to place human
resources in their optimal positions
what is Expatriate Failure:
Expatriate failure happens when an employee sent to work in a foreign country (an expatriate or “expat”) returns home early or does not meet performance expectations while abroad.
