Foreign locals: A cautionary tale on the culture of MNC local employees

Abstract

Multinational corporations (MNCs) rely heavily on local employees when conducting their international operations, yet the international business literature provides few instances of true focus on these employees. The commonly used label "host-country nationals" (HCNs) confers them an identity strongly related to the culture of their country, prompting both researchers and practitioners to "know" them through the knowledge about the local culture. This paper provides evidence that a more sophisticated view of the culture of HCNs is needed: through an ethnographic exploration of HCNs working in local subsidiaries of American MNCs in Romania, I reveal that HCNs are not always culturally interchangeable with the rest of the host-country population. HCNs can display a variety of cultural profiles more or less reflective of the national culture, depending on their enacted stance towards the native culture and the cultural landscape of the MNCs themselves. The findings call for further specification of theories relying on the assumed localness of HCNs, and should contribute to the ongoing conversation on the interplay between the cultures specific to the MNC and its host countries.

Managing talent across advanced and emerging economies: HR issues and challenges in a Sino-German strategic collaboration

“…This enabled strands of narrative and storytelling approaches in the data collection (Czarniawska, 1998;Gabriel, 2000Gabriel, , 2004Phillips and Oswick, 2012). Narrative-style data and analysis can produce rich information and insights on strategic partnership topics, such as intercultural influences managerial behaviours (Xing, Liu, Tarba and Cooper, 2014), post-merger integration (Monin, Noorderhaven, Vaara and Kroon, 2013;Melkonian, Monin, and Noorderhaven 2011), national culture influence on foreign MNC local employees (Caprar, 2011).…”

Conceptualizing and measuring culture in international business and management: From challenges to potential solutions

“…The basic assumption that core cultural values are stable constructs enduring for extended periods of time (e.g., Barkema & Vermeulen, 1997;Hofstede, 2006) has been called into question by research documenting changes in national cultures (e.g., Ralston, Egri, Stewart, Terpstra, & Kaicheng, 1999;Ralston et al, 2006), intra-national diversity (Taras et al, 2015;Tung, 2008), and multicultural features of workers in MNEs, often incorrectly assumed to be representative of their national cultures (Caprar, 2011). Moreover, recent research from cognitive psychology suggests a dynamic constructivist approach to culture (Hong et al, 2000;Molinski, 2007), allowing for even intra-individual cultural variation.…”

“…To date, we have concentrated dominantly on (a) explaining and characterizing culture and (b) using it as an explanation of dependent variables of interest to IB/IM researchers. What we have not addressed enough is culture as a dependent variable (i.e., what type of culture will arise in what type of circumstances; see, for instance, Caprar, 2011;Steel & Taras, 2010). In other words, one promising area of future work is to look at predicting culture, rather than using culture to predict something else.…”

“…Culture has been positioned as an antecedent, moderator, and mediator of strategic choices from entry form and mode, patterns of international expansion, cross-border knowledge transfer, to joint venture performance, entrepreneurship, and MNE corporate social responsibility, as well as leadership style, expatriate placement success, and a host of other individual-level outcomes (Kirkman, Lowe, & Gibson, 2006;Taras, Kirkman, & Steel, 2010a). More recently, researchers also began to consider culture as a dependent variable, influenced by business activities, especially in the context of cross-border merger and acquisitions and MNEs (Brannen & Salk, 2000;Caprar, 2011).…”

Theoretical Foundations

“…This includes topics such as increases of resource commitments over time (Johanson & Johanson, 2006;Santangelo & Meyer, 2011), competitive dynamics (Chang & Park, 2012;Narayanan & Fahey, 2005), headquarters-subsidiary relationships (de Jong et al, 2015;Jindra, Giroud, & Scott-Kennel, 2009), and subsidiary exports (Estrin, Meyer, Wright, & Foliano, 2008;Filatotchev, Stephan, & Jindra, 2008;Filatotchev, Liu, Buck, & Wright, 2009). Other scholars investigate internal processes in MNE subsidiaries, such as human resource management practices (Bjö rkman, Fey, & Park, 2007) and organizational culture (Caprar, 2011;Taylor et al, 2008;Welch & Welch, 2006). For emerging economy MNEs, the main challenge is to manage overseas subsidiaries when they are still at early stages of internationalization, and hence international management competences at headquarters are still weak (Meyer & Thaijongrak, 2013;Mutlu, Wu, Peng & Lin, 2015;Peng, 2012) .…”