STAFFING STRATEGIES

Staffing Strategies



Staffing Strategies

The Chinese mining company, Chinalco, will be investing $3 billion into the Toromocho mines, a figure the Peruvian government is happy with; however the Chinese have essentially brought two billion tonnes for US$410 a ton. The price of copper has been measured at US$8255 per ton. The investment of $3 billion seems meagre when Chinalco has a chance of making a 2000% profit. For Chinalco to start mining however, it will have to move an entire town across the valley. Morococha is an extremely impoverished area, with the vast majority of its residents living the most basic of lives, but this all comes together to make the offer of resettlement and $2000 hard to resist.

In general, the ethnocentric strategy suggests that companies should maximize their parent company control in order to integrate subsidiaries, at the cost of local responsiveness. The polycentric and regiocentric approaches both allow for more local responsiveness -- with less corporate integration . The geocentric strategy is the 'ideal', as it attempts to balance both global integration and local responsiveness . In a hierarchy, the geocentric strategy would be the best because it incorporates both of the theoretical ideals . Polycentric and regiocentric strategies would be second because they satisfy the local responsiveness ideal (usually at the cost of global integration) . Ethnocentric strategies, focusing on headquarters' control, are neither globally integrated nor locally responsive .

Generally, as foreign subsidiaries mature, they become more resource independent 'with respect to strategic resources, such as technology, capital, manage-ment, access to markets' (Prahalad and Doz . 1481 : 5) . With the dependency on the parent organization gone, multinationals, who wish to maintain control over their otherwise autonomous subsidiaries, use alternative methods such as fostering the parent organization's corporate culture worldwide (Prahalad and Doz, 1981) . The extent to which Chinese mining company desire their worldwide employees to share their corporate cultures will determine how (and if) host nationals are socialized into the parent corporate culture (Wilkins and Ouchi, 1983) . This will be evidenced through the processes and resource allocation given to socialization methods such as sending expatriates abroad to propagate corporate culture, selecting individuals who share the organization's values, bringing host nationals in house `to learn hog+ things are done', etc . (Kobrin, 1988 ; Doz and Prahalad, 1981).

Various human resource management practices are contingent upon the MNCs' international management strategy (Adler and Ghadar, 1990: Heenan and Perlmutter, 1979 ; Kobrin, 1988 ; Milliman et al., 1991 ; Tung, 1982; Tung and Punnett, 1993). The staffing policies which Chinese mining company, Chinalco adopt for their foreign subsidiaries (e .g ., recruitment, selection and placement), and the socialization tactics used for host national employees are examples of practices which will vary according to the strategy chosen . For example, when staffing a foreign sub-sidiary, several MNCs appoint expatriate employees to fill a variety of key posi-tions abroad (Kobrin, 1988; Stroh, Dennis and Cramer, in press ; Tung, 1981). When positions in foreign subsidiaries are not staffed by ...