Ficha de revisão: International HRM Strategies and Practices

📋 Course Outline

1. Course assessment and project
2. Globalization and IHRM context
3. Culture and cross-cultural management
4. Comparative HR and IR systems
5. Standardization and localization
6. International staffing and selection
7. Multinational performance management
8. International training and repatriation
9. Global talent management
10. Global compensation objectives
11. Expatriate pay approaches
12. Global compensation complexities

📖 1. Course assessment and project

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Terrain project : A group field project where you apply course theory to a real-world international HR practice inside an organization.
• Critical analysis : A structured evaluation of how an international corporation implements a chosen HR practice in practice.
• Group presentation : A class in-session delivery of your project findings and analysis, followed by discussion and feedback.
• Exam QCM : A multiple-choice exam assessing theory knowledge and the ability to identify and analyze international HRM issues.

📝 Essential Points

• The terrain project counts for 40% of the course grade.
• Each group selects one international HR practice for critical analysis from staffing, recruitment and selection; performance management; training, development and careers; talent management; or compensation management.
• Group presentations are scheduled for week 10 on 07/05, with additional assessment details provided in later lectures.
• The exam QCM counts for 60% of the course grade and uses a penalty of one third of a point for each wrong answer.
• If the exam is failed, an oral retake is available and the field project marks are carried over to August.

💡 Memory Hook

40/60 split: 40% project (7/05 presentation), 60% QCM (−1/3 per wrong answer); fail → oral retake, project marks carry to August.

📖 2. Globalization and IHRM context

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Economic globalization : Economic globalization is the increasing cross-border integration of goods, services, capital, and investment between countries.
• Cultural globalization : Cultural globalization is the gradual spread and convergence of social and cultural influences across countries worldwide.
• International (or Global) HRM : International HRM is an umbrella label for HR, payroll, and talent management activities carried out on a global scale.
• Home, Host, Other countries : Home, host, and other countries are the geographic reference points in multinational HRM linked to headquarters, subsidiaries, and external inputs.
• Expatriation : Expatriation is temporary relocation to another country for global assignments that meet specific organizational objectives.

📝 Essential Points

• Globalization is increasing interconnectedness among countries, societies, and economies, making goods, services, and cultural influences gradually more similar worldwide.
• For HRM, economic, cultural, political, and social globalization can affect processes like recruitment, selection, and career development even without overseas operations.
• International (or global) HRM covers HR, payroll, and talent management across countries because MNC/MNE activity and foreign direct investment keep growing and international migration rises.
• Morgan’s 3 dimensions frame international HRM as HR activities (procure, allocate, utilize), countries (home, host, other), and employee types (HCNs, PCNs, TCNs).
• Expatriates include long-term (>12 months) and short-term (3–12 months) assignees, plus flexpatriates (1–2 months) and self-initiated expatriates.

💡 Memory Hook

Think of globalization as a “5-flow system”: trade, finance, FDI/M&A, global brands, and mobile migration all forcing HR changes.

📖 3. Culture and cross-cultural management

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Culture : Culture is a patterned way of thinking, feeling, and reacting that shapes shared meanings within societies and organizations.
• Levels of culture : Culture can be analyzed at global, national, organizational, group, and individual levels depending on where shared meanings are formed.
• Artifacts values assumptions : Artifacts, values, and assumptions describe culture from visible practices to partly conscious values and deeply rooted taken-for-granted beliefs.
• Cross-cultural (HR) management : Cross-cultural (HR) management applies insights from cross-cultural psychology to explain and handle differences in HRM across cultures.
• Hofstede cultural dimensions : Hofstede’s cultural dimensions are six national-level traits used to compare how societies differ in work-related beliefs and preferences.

📝 Essential Points

• Culture’s core consists of traditional ideas linked to shared values, making it real in practice but abstract to manage or change.
• In Hofstede’s framework, power distance, individualism, masculinity, uncertainty avoidance, long-term orientation, and indulgence define six contrasting cultural dimensions.
• Cross-cultural management assumes that management practices vary by country and that the environment helps explain those variations.
• The Hofstede IBM study used one questionnaire across 116,000 employees in 20+ languages to infer national differences from subsidiaries in the same company.
• GLOBE expands on Hofstede by testing leadership effectiveness across cultures with phased development from dimensions to effects and ongoing analysis.

💡 Memory Hook

A-V-A ladder: Artifacts (seen) → Values (partly conscious) → Assumptions (unseen).

📖 4. Comparative HR and IR systems

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Institutional context of IHRM : Institutional context of IHRM describes how national institutional pressures shape HR practices through norms, values, and labor/education/industrial-relations arrangements.
• Country-of-origin effect : Country-of-origin effect is when multinationals transfer HR practices shaped by their home country institutions into subsidiaries more strongly in less restrictive host environments.
• Reverse diffusion : Reverse diffusion is when HR practices flow from foreign subsidiaries back to headquarters instead of only moving from headquarters outward.
• Dual vocational training : Dual vocational training is a German education-and-employment system combining part-time schooling with in-company learning that strongly affects HR recruitment criteria.

📝 Essential Points

• HRM in the USA is treated as a rational efficiency system in a five-step cycle (selection, performance, appraisal, rewards, development) with low state involvement in recruitment and dismissal and weak trade-union representation rights.
• European HRM is shaped by pervasive regulation on recruitment/dismissal, contracts, pay-related requirements, health and safety, working environment, and guaranteed trade-union representation rights.
• In France, managers’ orders are accepted when authority is justified (mainly by education/qualifications), but refused or resisted when authority is not established, while such resistance is viewed as normal communication.
• In the Netherlands, HR management follows organizational consensus, emphasizing ongoing communication where people accept orders once they understand them.
• In early China, ACFTU tightly party-controlled worker mobilization made industrial action rare and discontent mostly passive, but later reforms tied bonuses to production and required contributions to five insurance funds.

💡 Memory Hook

Home imports HR (country-of-origin effect), but subsidiaries can teach back (reverse diffusion).

📖 5. Standardization and localization

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Global standardization : Global standardization is the effort to create consistent HR practices that align a geographically dispersed workforce around common principles and objectives.
• Localization : Localization is the adaptation of HR practices to fit local cultural values, traditions, legislation, and other institutional constraints.
• Corporate culture informal control : Corporate culture can act as a subtle informal control mechanism by shaping employee behavior when direct supervision is difficult.
• Think global act local paradox : The think global act local paradox describes the tension between worldwide integration needs and demands for local responsiveness.

📝 Essential Points

• Firms standardize HR to ensure consistency, transparency, and alignment with common principles across countries.
• Firms localize HR to respect local cultural values and to comply with legislation or institutional constraints affecting HR and work practices.
• Standardization is driven by transnational strategy, an organizational structure that supports it, and a shared worldwide corporate culture.
• Localization is driven by the cultural environment, the institutional environment, the mode of operation abroad, and the subsidiary role in information flows and influence.
• Matrix structures coordinate across more than one dimension, but dual reporting can create conflict, confusion, information bottlenecks, and unclear accountability.

💡 Memory Hook

Std=Same principles worldwide; Local=Fit culture/laws; Corporate culture guides behavior when supervision is indirect.

📖 6. International staffing and selection

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Organizational staffing process : A staffing process is the sequence of activities an organization uses to plan for roles, attract candidates, assess them, and manage employees after hiring.
• Ethnocentric approach : An ethnocentric staffing approach favors parent-country nationals for key positions in both headquarters and subsidiaries.
• Coffee machine method : The coffee machine method is an informal early step in expatriate selection where executives chat and build a shortlist.
• Dual career couples : Dual career couples are partners whose career advancement creates a mobility constraint for selecting candidates for international assignments.

📝 Essential Points

• The organizational staffing process has four phases: planning, recruitment, selection, and retention management.
• Recruitment searches for and obtains enough qualified candidates so the organization can select the best people for its job needs.
• Selection gathers information to evaluate and decide who should be employed in a particular job.
• IHRM staffing can follow ethnocentric, polycentric, geocentric, or regiocentric orientations.
• Expatriate failure can include premature return, under-performance, or turnover after assignment completion.
• Dual career couples shrink the candidate pool and can increase expatriate failure when the spouse’s career needs are not accommodated.

💡 Memory Hook

4-stage staffing: Plan → Recruit → Select → Retain, and for expatriates remember dual-career couples reduce mobility and can trigger failure.

📖 7. Multinational performance management

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Performance management : Performance management is a control process that lets an MNE evaluate and continuously improve individual, subsidiary, and corporate performance against set goals and targets.
• Performance appraisal : Performance appraisal is the specific system used to evaluate an individual’s performance using expected outcomes and behaviors that support organizational goal attainment.
• Expatriate performance : Expatriate performance refers to how international employees (PCNs, TCNs, and HCNs) perform during foreign assignments under interacting assignment and context factors.
• Role conflict : Role conflict is the mismatch when an international manager’s understanding of host expectations conflicts with headquarters procedures or role expectations.

📝 Essential Points

• Performance management has three principal components: identifying objectives, conducting performance review, and performing formal evaluation.
• Multinational performance management faces constraints like data non-comparability, separation by time and distance, and differing market maturity levels.
• Expatriate performance depends on compensation package, task design, headquarters support, host environment demands, and individual and family cultural adjustment.
• For international employees, performance criteria can be hard, soft, and contextual goals, and job analysis should generate criteria that fit international work.
• With role sender and role recipient, headquarters may predetermine the expatriate’s role yet host-country behavior norms can require different actions, creating role conflict for PCNs.

💡 Memory Hook

3-C pillars for multinational PM: Objectives, Review, Evaluation—then judge expatriates using the 5-factor equation (Comp+Task+HQ+Env+Adjustment).

📖 8. International training and repatriation

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Training : Training is an HR activity designed to improve employees’ present work skills and behavior.
• Development : Development is an HR activity designed to expand employees’ capabilities for a future job or position.
• Human resources stock : Human resources stock is the accumulated store of knowledge, skills, and abilities a person has, built over time into identifiable expertise.
• International assignment as training : International assignments provide training and development by letting employees learn through international work experiences.
• Cross-cultural training : Cross-cultural training is a pre-departure approach that prepares employees for working in another culture.

📝 Essential Points

• International assignments typically run through three phases: pre-assignment preparation, on-assignment development through IAs, and post-assignment re-entry and repatriation.
• Cultural awareness training is the most common pre-departure training and is shaped by training method, rigor, and duration based on interaction expectations and culture novelty.
• Cross-cultural training can use information-giving, affective, or immersion approaches to develop cultural knowledge, emotional readiness, or experience-based adjustment.
• Pre-departure language training supports both task performance and cultural adjustment, and learning takes significant time and effort.
• Formal repatriation programs often include preparation and transition support, financial and tax help, re-entry career assistance, reverse culture shock handling, and networking opportunities.

💡 Memory Hook

Pre → Cross-culture (info/affect/immersion) → IA develops → Post (repat) uses the same idea: prepare, integrate, then build networks.

📖 9. Global talent management

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Global talent management : Global talent management is the set of organizational activities to attract, select, develop, and retain the best employees in strategic roles across countries.
• Talent attraction : Talent attraction refers to GTM activities aimed at drawing suitable individuals into the firm’s talent pipeline at the global level.
• Talent development : Talent development covers GTM efforts that build employees’ capabilities for present roles and future positions.
• Talent retention : Talent retention comprises GTM actions designed to keep high-potential employees with the firm over time.
• Talent pool strategy : Talent pool strategy is a hiring approach that focuses on maintaining candidate pools rather than filling a single role as it opens.

📝 Essential Points

• GTM definition depends on context, because “talent” is interpreted differently across organizations, industries, and national settings.
• GTM often frames talent as innate abilities, acquired skills, or a whole person whose strengths drive organizational performance.
• Exclusive and inclusive approaches to global TM differ in how eligibility for talent programs is defined and applied to employees.
• A recommended attraction practice is continuous performance and potential assessment using multiple inputs.
• Outcomes of TM include employee-level effects like job satisfaction, commitment, higher quality of work, and improved performance.
• MemoryHook":"GTM = A-D-R: Attraction, Development, Retention of talent, with each ‘talent’ definition shaped by context."}]})}}],

💡 Memory Hook

GTM = A-D-R: Attraction, Development, Retention of talent, with each ‘talent’ definition shaped by context.

📖 10. Global compensation objectives

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Global compensation : Global compensation is the offering of monetary and non-monetary rewards that employees value according to their contribution to multinational performance.
• Expatriate compensation package : An expatriate compensation package bundles multiple reward elements such as base pay, benefits, perquisites, and incentives to support future and present assignment needs.
• Global corporate culture reinforcement : Global compensation can be used as a tool to shape and reinforce a shared corporate culture across countries within a multinational enterprise.

📝 Essential Points

• Global compensation typically includes base salary, benefits, perquisites, and both long- and short-term incentives, aiming at attracting, retaining, and motivating employees now and later.
• Global compensation is increasingly viewed as a mechanism for building and reinforcing a global corporate culture.
• Global compensation is also treated as a primary source of corporate control within multinational organizations.
• Organization and expatriates may pursue different compensation objectives when designing and using global pay systems.

💡 Memory Hook

Think of global pay as A-R-M plus C: Attract–Retain–Motivate while creating Culture and enabling Control.

📖 11. Expatriate pay approaches

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Going rate approach : Approach where expatriate base pay is set using market salary rates and survey comparisons rather than home-country pay alone.
• Balance sheet approach : Approach that maintains the employee’s home-country living standard and adds host-country adjustments plus incentives to keep the package attractive.
• Local plus approach : Approach that pays expatriates according to host-country pay rules and adds expatriate-type benefits to recognize foreign status.
• Cost-of-living allowance COLA : Allowance that compensates for differences in everyday expenditures between the home country and the foreign country, based on family size.

📝 Essential Points

• The going rate approach relies on survey comparisons among home-country nationals, same-nationality expatriates, or expatriates of all nationalities, with allowances added in low-pay countries.
• The balance sheet approach uses home pay and benefits as a base, then applies expenditure adjustments and financial incentives, and it is the most common system in MNEs.
• The local plus approach typically excludes COLA, mobility premiums, hardship allowances, familiarization visits, home leave, and cross-cultural training, as well as other partner or pre-departure support.
• A stated rationale for local plus is that many junior expatriates accept a reduced package in exchange for international experience that supports future careers.

💡 Memory Hook

Going rate = market surveys; Balance sheet = home standard + premiums; Local plus = host pay + expatriate benefits.

📖 12. Global compensation complexities

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Tax equalization : Tax equalization is a global compensation approach that aims to keep expatriates' overall tax burden comparable to what it would have been at home.
• Tax protection : Tax protection is a global compensation approach that limits expatriates' tax losses by guaranteeing that certain tax outcomes do not fall below a defined level.
• Pay comparability resentment : Pay comparability resentment is the feeling of inequity that can arise when pay levels differ between expatriates and locals or between different expatriate groups.
• PCN and TCN pay differentiation : PCN and TCN pay differentiation is an expatriate pay outcome created when nationality determines the relevant home-country base pay level.

📝 Essential Points

• Global compensation can involve tightly linked private and government fund transfers, so tax and pension arrangements strongly affect incentive and cost design.
• Tax equalization and tax protection represent different ways to manage expatriates' tax outcomes within an international compensation package.
• Pay comparability issues can create resentment when TCNs are paid using home-country bases, even if the approach lowers cost.
• Using nationality to set relevant home-country base salary can differentiate pay across expatriates and effectively separate PCNs from TCNs.
• Global executive pay practices face a governance debate between competitive individualism with larger pay gaps and cooperative collectivism with smaller pay gaps.

💡 Memory Hook

Think “Taxes, Comparability, Nationality, Governance” to recall the main sources of global pay complexity.

📅 Key Dates

📊 Synthesis Tables

Standardization vs localization

Expatriate pay approaches

⚠️ Common Pitfalls & Confusions

1. Mixing up the three HR directions in Morgan’s model (activities vs countries vs employee types) instead of using all three together.
2. Assuming Hofstede and GLOBE measure “the same” dimensions without differences in modification/expansion and levels (societal vs organizational).
3. Confusing country-of-origin effect with reverse diffusion (outward transfer vs backflow to headquarters).
4. Thinking standardization and localization are “either/or” when the course emphasizes interdependent factors and possible compromise.
5. Believing expatriate selection is always formal and rational, forgetting the coffee machine method produces an informal shortlist.
6. Treating role conflict as only a performance issue rather than a mismatch between host expectations and headquarters procedures/role expectations.
7. Confusing “tax equalization” with “tax protection” when both manage expatriates’ tax outcomes but aim at different comparability/limits.

✅ Exam Checklist

1. State the course weighting for the terrain project and the exam QCM, and the penalty rule for wrong QCM answers.
2. For the terrain project, list the allowed HR practice categories (staffing/recruitment/selection; performance management; training/development/careers; talent management; compensation management) and what the group must do (critical analysis, organization contact, presentation).
3. Define globalization as increasing interconnectedness/interdependence and explain how it can impact HRM even when firms do not operate globally.
4. Explain International (or global) HRM as an umbrella term covering HR, payroll, and talent management on a global scale, and identify Morgan’s three dimensions (procure/allocate/utilize; home/host/other; HCN/PCN/TCN).
5. Describe cross-cultural management’s core assumption (differences in management practices by country and the environment) and distinguish artifacts, values, and assumptions levels of culture.
6. List Hofstede’s six national-level dimensions and summarize how GLOBE expands/testing leadership effectiveness across cultures with multiple phases.
7. For comparative HR and IR systems, contrast the USA’s low state involvement/autonomy model with Europe’s pervasive regulation and trade-union representation rights, and recall key examples given for France and the Netherlands.
8. Explain global standardization vs localization: their aims and the main drivers supporting each.
9. In international staffing, define the organizational staffing process phases (planning, recruitment, selection, retention management) and the ethnocentric/polycentric/geocentric/regiocentric orientations.
10. In expatriate selection and failure, identify the coffee machine method and list expatriate failure types (premature return, under-performance, turnover after assignment completion) and at least two reasons.
11. For multinational performance management, name the three principal components (identifying objectives, performance review, formal evaluation) and the five factors determining expatriate performance (compensation package, task, headquarters support, environment, cultural adjustment).
12. For training/repatriation, state the three assignment phases (pre-assignment, on-assignment, post-assignment) and the content categories of formal repatriation programs (preparation, tax/financial help, career path, reverse culture shock, schooling, workplace changes, stress management, networking).
13. For global talent management, state GTM’s three core aspects (attraction, development, retention) and the main idea that “talent” must be defined contextually.
14. For global compensation, recall global compensation’s objectives (attract/retain/motivate) and its defined components (base salary, benefits, perquisites, long- and short-term incentives; and expatriate package elements).