Different countries or different regions could have different approaches to managing people. This is mainly due to cultural differences. This essay will select American, Japanese and China which have obvious distinctive cultural contexts and compare their human resource management practices. On the other hand, take some multinational corporations, such as Wal-Mart, Panasonic and IBM, as an example to compare their different human resource management practices in these three countries. Besides, the essay will explain the reasons why the different human resource management practices happened from the cultural aspects.
The essay includes the following:
• The role of national culture in IHRM • Comparison in recruitment and selection aspect • Comparison in training and development aspect • Comparison in reward and performance management aspect
1 The role of national culture in IHRM
Culture is regarded as the one of most important factors to influence to international human resource management. Managers and Employees could have different processes, behaviours and values on decision-making because they come from different cultures (Harris, 2004)
Multinational companies (MNCs) regard that HR play a very important role in sustaining their competitive advantage in high competitive global environment which the workforce becomes more diverse and multicultural (Scullion and Linehan, 2005).
They will find that successfully importing Western human resource policies and practices into operations based in some developing countries was very difficult because there are some cultural barriers between different countries (Faten, 2008). In order to deal with this situation effectively, HR must be knowledgeable about cross-cultural factors in international human resource management. So the companies could more effectively and efficiently use their HR to achieve successfully their mission and goals by promoting study of cross-cultural