International Human Resource Management

The field of human resources management (HRM) has undergone several seismic shifts in the last 30 years, and these shifts cause businesses to challenge old concepts of dealing with employees. One of the results of this different thinking is that the whole spate of activities that were once handled by the department usually known as "personnel" are now either handled by a department called "human resources", or even turned over to an outside firm for management. This change reflects the concept that people, the human capital, are quite important, in fact, essential to any organization.

A further complication in the field is that "personnel" or "human resources" (whatever we call it) has tended, until the last twenty years or so, to be specifically one culture. This is quite possibly because most of the developments in the field came from American companies, so the concepts were essentially American. Today's international business environment, as characterized by Barnatt (1997) has only one consistency -- uncertainty. He cites this as being due to the fact that

The desire for ever-increasing flexibility in business operations [leads to] the 'virtual organization' - of an extremely loose web of individuals, capital and technologies which may operate in amalgamation as the ultimate flexible organizational form" (Barnatt,1997 36).

It can be argued that in no part of the corporate business model is this uncertainty mo

nsitivity, or rather, are attempting to develop this sensitivity. Palich (1999) addressed this issue: Faced with stiff global competition, American firms are recognizing the urgency to internationalize their operations, a trend evidenced by a tenfold expansion of foreign ventures during the 1980s alone. The trend accelerated in the 1990s. This expansion is fueled by a number of motivations - e.g., to search for new markets in an effort to exploit unique assets in overseas markets, to gain access to lower cost or higher quality inputs (labor, raw materials, intermediate goods, specialized skills, etc.), to build scale economies and other efficiencies, and to preempt competitors that may seek similar advantages in strategic markets (Palich, 1999, 133). Palich goes on to argue, quite convincingly, that the current academic research showing the strong impact of culture on business practices around the world is being ignored by businesses when planning their H.R. strategies. One noted scholar whose ideas have been adopted by several H.R. departments, including Viacom and Coca-Cola, was Hofstede (1980), who theorized that culture had four dimensions: power distance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism-collectivism, and masculinity

Category: Business - I