Different Subsidiary Roles and International Human Resource Management: An Exploratory Study of Australian Subsidiaries in Asia

ABSTRACT

The present study adopts a resource-dependence theory to identify different strategic roles of 44 Australian subsidiaries operating in Asia (including New Zealand). It further examines how these different strategic roles affect human resource management (HRM) activities of the subsidiaries. The results of this study appear to vary according to different approaches adopted to measure resource flows among organizational sub-units within an MNC. While the dyadic parent-subsidiary resource flows were found to strongly affect the IHRM of Australian MNCs, the network perspective to resource flows did not reveal any significant relationship to their IHRM. This lack of empirical support for the linkage under the network perspective seems to suggest that there may exist other factors more significant in determining HRM at the subsidiary. Furthermore, it appears to show that the traditional dyadic relationship between the parent company and the subsidiary is still of much relevance in the context of Australian MNCs.

KEYWORDS:

• International Human Resource Management (IHRM)
• strategic subsidiary roles
• resource flows
• network perspective
• Australian subsidiaries in Asia