The dilemma facing multinational enterprises: transfer or adaptation of their human resource management systems

Abstract

This study, within the discipline of International Human Resource Management, analyses the readiness of multinational enterprises to export their human resource management (HRM) system to their subsidiaries abroad, depending on the perceived quality of the system and the differences in the cultural contexts of the headquarters and subsidiaries. Using a qualitative exploratory study of 8 Basque firms and another quantitative study of a sample of 58 Spanish industrial multinationals, we conclude that the quality of the headquarters-based HRM system has a significant influence when it comes to deciding whether to export it to the subsidiary, whereas the difference in cultural contexts is not decisive when transferring the basic principles of the human resource system, although it is possibly decisive in the transfer of practices and subprocesses.

How far has international HRM travelled? A systematic review of literature on multinational corporations (2000–2014)

“…It is indicative because not all empirical studies in the dataset provide a full list of the countries in which their studies were conducted, although these are only a minority. Some studies did not provide names of the countries studied, but only mentioned the geographic region (e.g., Europe, Nordic, and Western Europe) or cultural region (e.g., Basque in Lertxundi & Landeta, 2012) in which the study was conducted. A small number listed the countries with the highest response rates and grouped together those with the lowest, using a catch-all phrase such as 'rest of the world' (e.g., Collings et al, 2010) or 'others' (e.g., Asmussen et al, 2013).…”

National and firm-level drivers of the devolution of HRM decision making to line managers

“…First, at the firm level, we investigate the impact of HR functional power on the location of responsibility for HR decision-making. Second, as, both formal and informal national-level institutions impose pressure on firms to localize HR architecture such as HR decision-making responsibility (Caligiuri, Lepak & Bonache, 2010, Lertxundi & Landeta 2012, we argue that national context is also important to MNCs when developing their global talent management architecture (Sparow, Scullion & Tarique, 2014). While the impact of national context on the location of HR decision-making has been reported in previous studies (Brewster & Larsen, 2000;Gooderham & Nordhaug, 2011;Mayrhofer, Brewster, Morley & Ledolter, 2011;Mayrhofer, Muller-Camen, Ledolter, Strunk & Erten, 2004), the coexistence of, and distinction between, formal and informal national institutions has been largely ignored.…”

How much does job autonomy vary across countries and other extra-organizational contexts?

“…5 Conceptually, inter-country distance (e.g., cultural or institutional distance) has been identified as one of, if not the main theoretical lens or master metaphor in international business and cross-cultural management theory, meant to capture the set of challenges that MNEs and other actors face due to the extent of dissimilarity between their home-country environment and the host-country environment (Ghemawat 2001;Eden and Miller 2004;Zaheer, Schomaker and Nachum 2012;Van Hoorn and Maseland 2014;Hutzschenreuter, Kleindienst and Lange 2015). Issues that have been analyzed using the concept of inter-country distance are correspondingly broad and include such key topics in international HRM as the transfer of routines, subsidiary compensation strategies and expatriate deployment (Roth and O'Donnell 1996;Kostova 1999;Gong 2003;Colakoglu and Caligiuri 2008;Lertxundi and Landeta 2012).…”