Meeting the global imperative of local leadership talent development in Hong Kong, Singapore, and India

Abstract

As companies continue to expand abroad, there remains a paramount challenge of ensuring strategic control to meet company standards and goals and to coordinate global operations. Traditionally, such control has been maintained by sending tried and true managers from company headquarters as expatriates to head up foreign operations. But in the face of this costly traditional approach for leadership staffing in foreign operations, there is increased awareness among multinational firms that their potential leadership talent is not restricted by their headquarters' national boundaries. MNCs are increasingly looking to their employees worldwide as a viable source of future talent for leadership staffing throughout their global operations. The results of field interviews with local leaders of American firm subsidiaries located in Singapore, India, and Hong Kong revealed four key local leadership development approaches: reinforcing a company culture of leadership development, identifying and codifying leadership talent, enhancing high potentials' visibility, and developing pervasive mentoring relationships. The cases examined here show that talent identification and development are essential elements of an effective long‐term talent management strategy that should be ingrained within a company's deep cultural values and priorities, as well as reinforced by performance evaluation and reward systems. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Inpatriate managers: Are they being effectively utilized as global talent?

“…Our findings imply that all host country managers may not necessarily be the best choice for an HQ assignment. They may not automatically all be high‐potential candidates for the global talent pool, despite their exceptional achievements in their former subsidiary, as attested to by the supervisor from company C. One solution put forward (Dunnagan, Maragakis, Schneiderjohn, Turner, & Vance, ) could be for these experienced host‐country managers to take up a country manager role in a different subsidiary (i.e., as third‐country nationals [TCNs]). TCNs are managers of other nationalities hired by the MNC to operate in a particular host country.…”

Recognizing the important role of self-initiated expatriates in effective global talent management

“…New SIE employee orientation and ongoing learning opportunities also should examine company cultural values and priorities, focusing on particular policies and practices at the local subsidiary that correspond to those values and priorities. As with local HCN talent identified for potential future company leadership, SIEs also should be given opportunities to travel to other company operations and meetings as well as spend time at company headquarters to provide valuable professional interactions and informal networking opportunities with company colleagues that promote the development of a common company mind-set and professional identity (Dunnagan, Maragakis, Schneiderjohn, Turner, & Vance, 2013).…”

Talent Development in Russian Companies: Main Peculiarities and Influence on a Company’s Performance

“…Страны с развивающейся экономикой на-ходятся в центре внимания исследовате-лей, изучающих проблематику управления талантливыми сотрудниками [Dunnagan et al, 2013;Sita, Panapati, 2013;Latukha, 2015]. В ряде работ отмечается, что талан-ты являются источником конкурентного пре имущества компаний из развивающих-ся стран [Richman, Wiggenhorn, 2005].…”

“…Развивающиеся страны предостав-ляют крупным компаниям, ведущим в них свою деятельность, огромные возможно-сти. Однако организациям весьма сложно избегать определенных проблем и рисков [Richman, Wiggenhorn, 2005;Dunnagan et al, 2013;Cooke, Saini, Wang, 2014], воз-никающих из-за специфических особенно-стей этих стран. Одна из таких проблем -поиск высокопотенциальных работников [Ready, Hill, Thomas, 2014].…”

“…Развивающиеся экономики весьма при-влекательны с точки зрения ведения биз-неса [Dunnagan et al, 2013]. Несмотря на то что фирмы из этих стран сильно из-менили конкурентную среду на междуна-родной арене бизнеса, они по-прежнему нуждаются в развитых и передовых управ-ленческих практиках (см., напр.…”