Transfer of HRM Practices in MNCs [2000-2010]

Research program 4: an insight into the interplay of cultural, institutional and organisational factors that affect the transfer of HRM practices across borders.

Anne-Wil Harzing - Sat 6 Feb 2016 16:10 (updated Sun 24 Apr 2022 11:08)

One of the central questions in the MNC literature is the extent to which their subsidiaries act and behave as local firms (local isomorphism) versus the extent to which their practices resemble those of the parent or some other global standard (internal consistency).

This program provides an insight into the interplay of cultural, institutional and organisational factors that affect the transfer of HRM practices across borders. Most of the papers in this program are summarized into these blogposts: Transfer of HR practices in multinational companies and The golden triangle: standardization, localization or dominance?

Transfer or HRM practices of European MNCs to Greece

As is the case in many other areas of international management, previous research in this area has focused mostly on Japan and the USA as home/host countries. Within Europe, research has almost exclusively focused on Germany and the UK.

In the first project, Barbara Myloni and I therefore purposefully selected underrepresented research settings such as Greece, and focused on European MNCs rather than Japanese and American MNCs only. Data were collected for 135 subsidiaries and local companies in Greece. Three journal articles were published [International Journal of Cross Cultural Management and International Journal of Manpower and International Journal of Human Resource Management].

Convergence to best practices: the dominance effect

Another research project, in collaboration with Markus Pudelko, led to the rather surprising conclusion that for what might be considered to be the most localized of functions - human resource management - convergence to a world-wide best practices model (also called dominance effect) is clearly present for Japanese and German MNCs and as such challenges established beliefs in this area.

We suggested that MNCs might limit transfer of practices to what they consider to be their core competencies and converge to best practices in other areas. This paper won the Ulrich-Lake award for the best paper published in Human Resource Management in 2007. A related paper with Markus Pudelko looks at management practices in Europe and assessed the extent to which a common European model is present, whilst a subsequent book chapter dealt with Japanese HRM in particular.

Publications

Online papers - Full list of publications

1. Pudelko, M.; Harzing, A.W. (2010) Japanese HRM: Inspirations from abroad and current trends of change, in: Bebenroth, R. (ed) International Human Resource Management in Japan, London: Routledge.
2. Pudelko, M.; Harzing, A.W. (2008) The Golden Triangle for MNCs: Standardization towards headquarters practices, standardization towards global best practices and localization, Organizational Dynamics, vol. 37, no. 4, pp. 394–404. Available online...
3. Pudelko, M.; Harzing, A.W. (2008) Human Resource Management and Japan, paper presented at the RIEB-Center Workshop, Kobe University, March 27th 2008.
4. Pudelko, M.; Harzing, A.W. (2007) Country-of-Origin, Localization or Dominance Effect? An empirical investigation of HRM practices in foreign subsidiaries, Human Resource Management, vol. 46, no. 4, pp. 535-559. Available online... [Winner of the 2007 Ulrich-Lake award for the best paper published in Human Resource Management.]
5. Myloni, B.; Harzing, A.W.; Mirza, H.R. (2007) The effect of organisational factors on the transfer of human resource management practices: European and US MNCs and their Greek subsidiaries, The International Journal of Human Resource Management, vol. 18, no. 12, pp. 2057–2074. Available online...
6. Pudelko, M.; Harzing, A.W. (2007) How European is management in Europe? An analysis of past, present and future management practices in Europe, European Journal of International Management, vol. 1, no. 3, pp. 206-224. Available online...
7. Pudelko, M.; Harzing, A.W. (2006) HRM practices in subsidiaries of US, Japanese and German MNCs: Country-of-origin, localization or dominance effect?, paper presented at the annual meeting of the Academy of International Business, Beijing, China, 23-26 June.
8. Pudelko, M.; Harzing, A.W. (2006) Country of origin, localization and dominance effects in the transfer of HRM practices: US, Japanese and German MNCs?, conference proceedings of the Academy of International Business, UK Chapter, Manchester, 7-8 April.
9. Myloni, B.; Harzing, A.W.; Mirza, H.R. (2005) The effect of organisational factors on the transfer of human resource management practices: European and US MNCs and their Greek subsidiaries, conference proceedings of the 8th conference on International Human Resource Management, June 14-16, 2005, Cairns, Australia.
10. Myloni, B.; Harzing, A.W.; Mirza, H.R. (2004) Host country specific factors and the transfer of Human Resource Management practices in multinational companies, International Journal of Manpower, vol. 25, no. 6, pp. 518-534. Available online...
11. Myloni, B.; Harzing, A.W.; Mirza, H.R. (2004) Human Resource Management in Greece: Have the colours of culture faded away?, International Journal of Cross Cultural Management, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 59-76. Available online...
12. Myloni, B.; Harzing, A.W.; Mirza, H.R. (2003) Host country specific factors and the transfer of Human Resource Management practices in multinational companies, paper presented at the 7th Conference on International Human Resource Management, June 4-6, 2003, Limerick, Ireland.
13. Myloni, B.; Harzing, A.W.; Mirza, H.R. (2003) Organisational factors and their effect on the transfer of human resource management practices from parent companies to their overseas affiliates: European and US headquarters and their Greek subsidiaries, paper presented at the 3rd Annual Conference of the European Academy of Management, April 3-5, 2003, Milan, Italy.
14. Myloni, B.; Harzing, A.W.; Mirza, H.R. (2002) A comparative analysis of HRM practices in subsidiaries of MNCs and local companies in Greece, conference proceedings of the 28th EIBA conference, Athens, 8-10 December.
15. Myloni, B.; Harzing, A.W. (2001) Transfer of Human Resource Management practices from parent companies to their overseas affiliates - A focus on organisational factors, paper presented at the International Conference of Multinational Companies and HRM: Between Globalisation and national Business Systems, DMU Leicester, 12-14 July.
16. Myloni, B.; Harzing, A.W. (2000) Can cultural and institutional theories be combined to explain cross-national differences in management? Along the lines of methodological individualism and holism, paper presented at the 16th EGOS colloquium, 2-4 July, Helsinki.