s are enforced, and a system of advancement both horizontally and vertically exists for employee growth. Given this set of statistics, the first impression would be that the human resources office at Viacom's Global headquarters in New York City must employ thousands of employees to keep track of all the human resources obligations.
In fact, a staff of less than 35 people handles that job. How that is done is the topic of this analysis. In turn, it will examine: Viacom's human resource policies; its hiring policies; its recruitment programs; its outsourcing policies; and most important, its communications policies.
Because of the range of Viacom's activities in foreign countries, and its overall corporate philosophy of buying up existing companies and assuming a general "hands off" attitude towards them (as long as profit projections are met), the Viacom headquarters human resources office is divided into sector groups, rather than the traditional HR organization of people assigned to benefits, oversights, training, hiring, motivation, and so on (Viacom, 1997).
This is a necessary organizational step since few of the nations that Viacom does business in have employment protection laws similar in fact or in philosophy to the broad code of regulations governing an American company when dealing with employees.
As Hofsted points out in her 1980 study, national cultural differences and employee-related values are reflected in legislation, which has been seen in the HR field as a significant reflector of national values. In this sense, even though the U.S. has many rules concerning employment (anti-discrimination, equal opportunity, workplace safety, etc.), America, as Brewster (1995) points out, has "comparatively less legislative control over (or interference from, or support for) the employment relationship than is found in most of Europe" (Brewster, 1995, 7).
One German authority points out that "the major diff...