Global staffing: a review and thematic research agenda

Abstract

This paper provides the context for the current special issue on global staffing and provides an up to date review of the state of the art in the literature in the area. We explore the key role played by global staffing in strategic international human resource management, with a particular focus on innovation, organisational learning and corporate integration. We then consider the evolution of global staffing research over time. Finally, we point to a number of key contemporary issues which could help to guide future research in global staffing.

Keywords:

• corporate integration
• expatriation
• global staffing
• innovation
• inpatriation
• organisational learning
• third country nationals

Notes

1. We utilise the terms multinational corporation and multinational enterprise interchangeably in this paper.

2. We recognise that a number of authors have been critical of the term inpatriate and argued that it actually refers to a category of expatriate staff and could be considered to represent an ethnocentric view in firms from dominant markets (see Torbiorn 2005). Others (Dowling et al. 2008), illustrate the confusion associated with differing definitions of inpatriation in practice and in the literature and question the value added by the term inpatriate. Nonetheless, given its established use in the literature we use it to represent the transfer of foreign nationals to the HQ organisation on a permanent or semi-permanent basis.

3. This review is not intended to be exhaustive. Rather the emphasis is identifying the key trends in global staffing research over time. Our focus in limited to English language research, although we expect that there are similar literature bases available in other languages. While Harzing (2001) has illuminated some of the German language research, a larger scale review which summarised contributions in other languages would be welcome. In some instances the issues discussed were touched upon earlier, however our emphasis is on identifying when they became mainstream research interests as evidenced through published studies.