ASSIGNMENT NO.

17
Answer the following Review Questions:

1.      You are the president of a small business. What are some of the ways you expect “going
international” will affect HR activities in your business?
2.      What are some of the specific, uniquely international activities an international HR manager
typically engages in?
3.      What intercountry differences affect HRM? Give several examples of how each may affect
HRM.
4.      You are the HR manager of a firm that is about to send its first employees overseas to staff a
new subsidiary. Your boss, the president, asks you why such assignments often fail, and what
you plan to do to avoid such failures. How do you respond?
5.      As an HR manager, what program would you establish to reduce repatriation problems of
returning expatriates and their families?

1. Dealing with global human resource challenges as a manager isn’t easy. The employer faces an array of
political, social, legal, and cultural differences among countries abroad. What works in one country may
not work in another.
2. Formulating and implementing HR policies and activities in the home-office of a multinational
company. This HRM manager would engage in selecting, training, an transferring parent-company
personnel abroad and formulating HR policies for the firm as a whole and for its foreign operations.
- Conducting HR activities in the foreign subsidiary of an MNC is another form. Again, local HR
practices are often based on the parent firm's HR policies, fine tund for local country practices.
- Focusing on local responsiveness and global integration.
- Offering promising managers the opportunity to grow and gain experience so that an environment for
continuous learning will be created throughout the en tire organization.
- Identifying top management potential early, identifying critical success factors for future international
managers, providing developmental opportunities, tracking and maintaining commitments to individuals
in international career paths, trying strategic business planning to HR planning and vice versa and dealing
with multiple business units while attempting to achieve globally and regionally.
3. Cultural Factors. U.S. managers may be most concerned with getting the job done. Chinese managers
may be most concerned with maintaining a harmonious environment. And Hispanic managers may be
more concerned with establishing trusting, friendship relationships.
- Economic Factors. U.S. economic systems tend to favor policies that value productivity while more
socialistic countries like Sweden would favor policies that prevent unemployment.
- Labor Cost Factors. Mexican labor costs (low) can allow inefficiencies of labor, while German labor
costs (high) might require a focus on efficiency. Industrial Relations Factors. German law requires that
workers have a' vote in setting policies while in Japan the employees do not have a say, but the
government may have a say in establishing policies.
- Global HR outlook need appreciative of different cultures, understanding that motivates people from
different societies, and how that is reflected in th e structure of international assignments. In China, for
instance, special insurance should cover emergency evacuations for serious health problems; telephone
communication can be a necessity in Russia.
4. Some of the employees are under pressure to adapt to the new culture and their overall responsibilities
are often different or larger than before, to get adjusted with it, they need to spend more time at work.
Subsequently they spend less time for family, which creates pressure on family. This can result into
reduced work efficiency or physical illness.
They fill cut-off from their own family and friends. Sometimes spouse will probably discover that
suitable employment for her is next to impossible in an emerging country like Brazil. They may suffer
from the greatest cultural shock in the new country like employee going from Asia to America.
Sometimes employee finds difficult to handle the additional responsibility. He may supervise 5 to
10 times more people than ever before. It is quiet challenging to manage at a time, expectations of
reporting managers, subordinates handling and to reach out expectations of clients in other countries. Due
to which employee may not be able to deliver required result. Some of the employees may generally feel
more important abroad than in their home country. The combination of higher level of responsibility and
enhanced social status can be difficult to handle due to lack of emotional maturity. As a result, it is not
uncommon for some of them to either destroy their career opportunities and/or marriages. As a result of
this, many expatriate postings are terminated early or the performance of the expatriate managers is
impaired and ultimately such assignments fail.

5. After selecting the employees to send abroad, attention turns to training and maintaining your
expatriate employees. In terms of pre-departure preparation, training efforts ideally first cover the impact
of cultural differences; then, the focus moves to getting participants to understand how attitudes influence
behavior, providing factual knowledge about the target country, and developing skills in areas like
language and adjustment.
In compensating expatriates, most employers use the balance sheet approach; this focuses on four
groups of expenses: income taxes, housing, goods and services, and discretionary expenses, and aims to
ensure that the employee’s standard of living abroad is about what it would have been at home. With
terrorism a threat, most employers today take protective measures, including buying kidnapping and
ransom insurance.
Well-thought-out repatriation programs emphasize keeping employees in the loop as far as what’s
happening in their home offices, bringing them back to the office periodically, and providing formal
repatriation services for the expatriate and his or her family to start preparing them for the return.