Individual and social aspects of global human resources staffing

Abstract

Globalization has become one of the most influential trends in the business environment in recent decades. Since companies started to spread their operations beyond national borders and to employ people originating from different countries, new challenges for human resource management have emerged. This paper ascertains, summarizes, and explains specificities of staffing in an international context, theories dealing with global staffing, and basic approaches to the staffing process in order to identify various determinants which may affect the process of choosing an appropriate staffing policy in multinational companies, i.e., the decision-making process about staffing of global managers in an international business environment. Various research has shown that the success of a global manager depends not only on the employee's personality and adaptability to different cultures, but also on the willingness and readiness of his or her family members to move to a foreign country. The conclusion of this paper is that staffing decisions for global managers, in addition to technical competencies and expertise, should take into consideration different individual and social factors (i.e., different personal attributes and skills, as well as specific requirements of a manager's family) and that selection procedures should be customized to enable determining the best individuals for managerial positions in foreign subsidiaries of multinational companies, who will be able to fit into the new environment quickly and easily and perform the job in an expected manner.