INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION The preceding case highlights one firm's experience in dealing with some international aspects of its personnel policies, an experience that is more comprehensive than one finds within most other firms operating internationally.2 Although companies have taken a variety of approaches to international human resource management, most agree on the importance of qualified personnel if they are to achieve their foreign growth and operation objectives. For instance, the Conference Board held a roundtable discussion of chief executives on how the world is changing and what, if anything, managements can do to keep change under control. The chairman of Unilever said, "The single most important issue for us has been, and will continue to be, organization and people."3
The need for highly qualified people to staff the organization cannot be overemphasized. Any company must determine its personnel needs, hire people to meet those needs, motivate them to perform well, and upgrade their skills so that they can move to more demanding tasks. The following summarizes the factors that make the management of international human resources different from the management of domestic resources.
1. Different labor markets. Each country has a different mix of available workers and a different mix of labor costs, and international companies may gain advantages by accessing these various human resource capabilities. For example, GM's Mexican upholstery operation employs low-cost production workers and IBM's Swiss R&D facility hires skilled physicists. Whether companies seek resources or markets abroad, they may produce the same product differently among countries, such as substituting hand labor for machines because of diverse labor markets.
2. International mobility problems. There are legal, economic, physical, and cultural barriers in moving workers to a foreign country. Yet interna-
tional firms benefit from moving people, especially when labor market differences result in shortages of needed skills. In such cases, companies often must develop special recruitment, training, compensation, and transfer practices.
3. Management styles and practices. Attitudes toward different management styles vary from country to country; norms among management practices and labor-management relations testify to this. These differences may strain relations between headquarters and subsidiary personnel or make a manager less effective when working abroad than at home. At the same time, the experience of working with different national practices offers some opportunities for transferring successful practices from one country to another.
4. National orientations. Although a company's goals may include attaining global efficiencies and competitiveness, its personnel (both labor and management) may emphasize national rather than global interests. Certain personnel practices can help overcome the national orientations, and other operating adjustments may be necessary when the nationalistic orientations prevail.
5. Control. Such factors as distance and diversity make it more difficult to control foreign operations than domestic ones, and personnel policies sometimes are used to gain more control over foreign operations. At the same time, distance and diversity may inhibit a company's ability to conduct personnel policies as it might prefer and cause its practices to vary from one country to another.
This chapter emphasizes these points, differentiating between managerial and labor personnel.