HRM textbook

598 PART 5 EMPLOYEE RELATIONS
Top management values will influence how they staff
their operations abroad. Ethnocentric companies tend
to emphasize home-country attitudes, polycentric companies
focus more on host-country employees, and
geocentric employers try to pick the best candidates from
wherever they might be. Selecting employees to successfully
work abroad depends on several things, most
importantly on adaptability screening and on making sure
that each employee s spouse and family get the realistic
previews, counseling, and support necessary to make
the transition abroad. Successful expatriates tend to be
extroverted, agreeable, and emotionally stable individuals.
3. After selecting the employees to send abroad, attention
turns to training and maintaining your expatriate
employees.
In terms of pre-departure preparation, training efforts
ideally first cover the impact of cultural differences;
then, the focus moves to getting participants to
understand how attitudes influence behavior,
providing factual knowledge about the target
country, and developing skills in areas like language
and adjustment.
In compensating expatriates, most employers use the
balance sheet approach; this focuses on four groups
of expenses: income taxes, housing, goods and
services, and discretionary expenses. The balance sheet
approach aims to provide supplements in such a way
that the employee s standard of living abroad is about
what it would have been at home. It s usual to apply
incentives such as foreign service premiums and
hardship allowances to get employees to move abroad.
Distance complicates the issue of appraising expatriate
managers, so it s prudent to let both the home-office
supervisor and the manager s local superior contribute
to the appraisal.
Labor relations tend to be different abroad from
what they are in the United States. For instance,
there s a much greater emphasis on centralized
bargaining in Europe.
With terrorism a threat, most employers today take
protective measures, including buying kidnapping
and ransom insurance.
To reduce the chronic problem of turnover among
newly returned employees, it s important to have
well-thought-out repatriation programs. These
emphasize keeping employees in the loop as far as
what s happening in their home offices, bringing
them back to the office periodically, and providing
formal repatriation services for the expatriate
and his or her family to start preparing them for
the return.
4. With employers increasingly relying on local rather
than expatriate employees, it s important for managers
to understand how to implement a global HR system.
Studies suggest that it is realistic for a company to try to
institute standardized human resource management
practices at their facilities around the world, although it
may be necessary to fine-tune them to the needs
of the specific facility. The basic approach involves
three steps. (1) Develop a more effective global HR
system (by forming global HR networks and remembering
that it s more important to standardize ends
rather than specific methods). (2) Make the global HR
system more acceptable (for instance, by taking a global
approach to everything the company does, by investigating
pressures to differentiate and determining their
legitimacy, and by creating a strong company culture).
(3) Implement the global system (by emphasizing continuing
communications and by ensuring that adequate
resources are available).
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. You are the president of a small business. What are some
of the ways you expect going international will affect
HR activities in your business?
2. What are some of the specific, uniquely international activities
an international HR manager typically engages in?
3. What intercountry differences affect HRM? Give several
examples of how each may specifically affect HRM.
4. You are the HR manager of a firm that is about to send
its first employees overseas to staff a new subsidiary.
Your boss, the president, asks you why such assignments
often fail, and what you plan to do to avoid such failures.
How do you respond?
5. What special training do overseas candidates need? In
what ways is such training similar to and different from
traditional diversity training?
6. How does appraising an expatriate s performance differ
from appraising that of a home-office manager? How
would you avoid some of the unique problems of
appraising the expatriate s performance?
7. As an HR manager, what program would you establish
to reduce repatriation problems of returning expatriates
and their families?
INDIVIDUAL AND GROUP ACTIVITIES
1. Working individually or in groups, outline an expatriation
and repatriation plan for your professor, whom
your school is sending to Bulgaria to teach HR for the
next 3 years.
2. Give three specific examples of multinational corporations
in your area. Check on the Internet or with each firm
to determine in what countries these firms have operations.
Explain the nature of some of their operations, and