ULUSLARARASI İŞLETME

There are many factors, including the cultural, economic and political conditions in different countries, which affect human resources management at the international level. Therefore, it is necessary to understand international human resources management in terms of its differences from domestic human resources management.

International human resources management (IHRM) refers to the planning, recruiting and selecting, training and developing, evaluating, and retaining employees for the international operations of international companies.

There is a shortage of brainpower in a particular country, preferably a shortage of people with the ideal mix of technical skills, experience with particular business methods.

Dowling, Festing, and Engle (2013) discussed six factors that drive the complexity of IHRM: new HR responsibilities, need for a broader perspective in compensation, greater involvement in personal lives of employees, the mix of foreigners versus locals, greater risk exposure, external influences of the government and national culture.

A MNE is said to be following an ethnocentric approach when strategic decisions are made at the headquarters; and critical positions in both the domestic and foreign operations of an MNE are filled by personnel from the parent country (PCNs) with no or minimal autonomy delegated to the foreign subsidiaries. (Patel and Budhwar, 2017: 120). If it is difficult for an MNE to articulate, specify, or standardize its core competency, it becomes invaluable to post a home-country manager with direct experience in developing, applying, and protecting that core competency. Firms may pursue this policy because locally qualified people are not always available, especially in developing and newly industrialized countries.

Implementing a geocentric policy successfully requires more centralized control of the staffing process, which has a longer lead time than a short term solution. The subsidiary autonomy is lost, which may be resisted by the subsidiary (Patel and Budhwar, 2017: 122).

Companies use many methods to prepare their employees for an international assignment. These methods tend to reflect an employee’s level of international involvement, of which environmental briefings reflect the lowest and field experience the highest. Field experience means visiting the culture, walking the streets of its cities and villages, and becoming absorbed by it for a short time. This can also be thought of as practical training, which is aimed at helping the expatriate and his/her family ease themselves into daily life in the host country (Hill, 2013). If the family is not included in the training and the international assignment, the alternatives will be a commuter marriage or an expatriate failure which are psychologically and financially expensive options.

A largely overlooked but critically important issue in the training and development of expatriate managers is to help them make the transition back to their home country. This training and development are called repatriation.

The criteria for performance appraisal are identified by Gregersen, Hite, and Black (1996) as: objective criteria, subjective criteria, and contextual criteria. Objective criteria (also defined as hard criteria) are about the quantifiable factors which can be directly measured based on tangible outcomes, such as market share, total revenues and return on investment.

Employee compensation is defined as all forms of pay going to employees that arise from their employment. Compensation has two main components: direct financial payments and indirect financial payments. Direct financial payments include wages, salaries, incentives, commissions, and bonuses; whereas indirect financial payments include financial benefits like employer-paid insurance (Dessler, 2017: 346). International compensation is defined as “the provision of monetary and nonmonetary rewards, including base salary, benefits, perquisites, long and short-term incentives, valued by employees based on their relative contributions to MNE performance” (Fenwick, 2004: 308).

With the going-rate approach, the base salary of the international assignee is linked to the salary structure in the host country, and MNEs usually supplement the base pay with additional payments and benefits in case the location is in a low-pay country. The advantages of this approach include equality with local nationals, simplicity, identification with host country and equity among different nationalities. There are also disadvantages of the approach. They include variation between assignments for the same employee, variation between expatriates of the same nationality in different countries, and potential reentry problems