Managing talent in emerging economy multinationals: integrating strategic management and human resource management

Abstract

Having established their first overseas operation, the next big challenge for many emerging economy multinational enterprises (EMNEs) is to align their HRs with their strategic ambition. Their lack of internationally experienced talent has become a major obstacle to strategy implementation: they need to fill leadership roles with international responsibility based abroad and at home, and they need to develop talent for future international leadership roles. The key challenge for catch-up strategies thus is to attract, develop, and retain talents who can lead international operations. In this paper, we develop a research agenda on strategic management and HRM in EMNEs that aims to explain the obstacles EMNEs face and facilitates the development of better talent management practice. In particular, we propose to integrate strategic management and HRM perspectives not only to advance theories but to enhance the relevance of both lines of scholarship to practice.

Keywords:

• Emerging economy multinationals
• human resource management
• talent management
• strategic management
• expatriates
• international management capabilities

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the case companies that provided us insights into their operations, as well as the CEIBS Global EMBA Program and the London Business School Shanghai Alumni Club for their support. Moreover, we thank the reviewers of this journal, as well as Philipp Boksberger, Kjeld-Erik Brødsgaard, Fabian Froese, Byron Lee, Marina Schmitz, and Rosalie Tung, who provided helpful comments and Alexandra Han who provided efficient research assistance.

Notes

1. Our research was conducted mainly in China, but we are acutely aware that emerging economies vary substantially, as we observed in our own company visits in India, Turkey, and Indonesia. Some challenges and practices we observe may be specific to a country or a subset of emerging economies and not generalizable across all emerging economies. In particular, we have to be careful when generalizing from Chinese data to other emerging economies. While we aim to develop a research agenda for EMNEs in general, we have to consider the specific nature of each country when interpreting empirical evidence.

2. We thank Rosalie Tung for alerting us to this pattern; see online video (minute 01:07:00–01:11:00) at www.sfu.ca/davidlamcentre/forum/past_PRF/PRF_2014/pacific-region-forum-january-30-2014.html