International Transfers of Managers in North American and European MNEs
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JOURNALOF INTERNATIONALBUSINESSSTUDIES, FALL 1985
to provide the necessary managers for international operations may find the overall strategies compromised or falling short of expectations (Heller, 1980; Doz and Prahalad,1981). The purpose of this study is to examine on a case by case basis, the relationship between the type of international operations of the firm and two basic human resource activities to staff these operations with managers. The first activity area concerns the issue of sourcing of human resources: which pools of human resources are used by MNEs to staff managerial positions in international operations? The second activity area concerns the issue of development of human resources: how do MNEs produce qualified personnel for managerial positions in international operations? The section which follows will elaborate on the theory and previous research which deals with these two aspects of human resource strategies. REVIEWOF LITERATURE
Despite the importance of international staffing, international personnel management remains one of the least studied areasof the management of international business (Tung, 1981; Harvey, 1981). International personnel management has been most commonly examined in terms of personnel functions such as selection, training and compensation for international jobs (Heenan, 1979). Only rarely, such as in the study by Edstrom and Galbraith (1977) has personnelmanagement been studied as being a matter of human resource strategy, closely related to the international corporate strategy of the firm. Generally, the human resource strategies of an MNE have to be inferred from a study of the other strategies and operations of the firm. The study by Edstrom and Galbraith (1977) focussed on the purposes of international management transfers. Their case study analysis of four MNEs developed a typology of transfersas follows: Transfersfor Staffing
The flow of personnel is from headquarters to foreign subsidiaries and back again, as required by lack of local personnel to fill a given position. These transfersare viewed as temporary assignments, while the main focus of the manager's career is oriented to headquarters. Transfersfor staffing only are most common in ethnocentric MNEs (Perlmutter, 1969; Heenan, 1979) which follow a strategy of domestic production and overseas exporting of finished or semi-finished goods. Key jobs in foreign subsidiaries are managed by expatriates from the headquarters country which puts pressure on the firm to have special selection, training, orientation, compensation, and re-entry policies and practices for expatriate managers (Miller, 1973; Zeira and Harari, 1979; Harvey, 1981). Zeira and Harari (1979) have argued that this approach actually reinforces ethnocentrism tendencies as the headquarter's view remains dominant in subsidiariesand host country nationals are rarelyjudged to be suffic
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