Development and training have to be made in the international context in the case of international assignment which normally involves magic spells of working overseas to understand varied cultural contexts and to assist to endorse attainment of organisational strategy. In the case of a long-term initiative, development is preferred and in the case of short-term intervention, training may be considered with the necessary skills transfer.
Jones Corp offers a variety of international short-run assignments, around a six to twelve months period mainly for career development especially for the top executives who work in the R&D department. At the same time, Jones Corp offers long-run international assignments which usually run from one to five years to the top executives in the UK Headquarters to supervise the establishment of new processes and to develop and coach “local employees” so that they could manage the Jones Corp subsidiary in the longer-run independently but of course with blending of headquarters’ management style.
Thus, Jones Corp presently runs an ethnocentric approach of international assignments where most of the key roles in the foreign subsidiaries are occupied by the parent nation’s executives. Under the ethnocentric approach, parent country nationals are being given an opportunity to serve in their overseas subsidiaries relatively for a longer period. This approach of Jones Corp is more or less analogous to the model developed by Bartlett and Ghoshal’s international development model of A multi-domestic approach.
Under Perlmutter’s polycentric approach, more focus is being given to the development of local nationals in key management roles. To make aware of the headquarters’ practice and policy, subsidiaries will be encouraged to train and develop local employees which may contain a transfer to the headquarters where they will be trained corporate culture of the headquarter and to impart the same into subsidiaries function. Customarily, Jones Corp’s will focus to manage at the local level of its retail management by initiating knowledge, training and skills from the corporate headquarters. Thus, Jones Corp, this approach is more analogous to Perlmutter’s polycentric approach of global management. Further, it is also analogous to Bartlett and Ghoshal’s Model B: international where a certain degree of local autonomy is ensured.
Jones Corp has recently implemented short-run training programs in its retail marketing functions facilitating top managers to practice Jones’ methodology to spread its style of marketing in other nations within their regional clusters like a retail manager in Australia is presently undergoing a 30 days training in Japan while the colleague from Japan is undergoing training in Australia. Thus, the current strategy of Jones Corp signifies the regiocentric methodology of global development where multinational organisations will make the best use of regional settings of business operations connected by a regional hub which strategically involve growth initiatives that involve a deputation of parent company officials to share their experiences with their overseas employees within their regional grouping.
Human resource development under the geographic approach will develop beyond the regional level and thus contain development programmes extending throughout the global level of their operations. Nationality will not be a constraint and the best employee will find the best opportunity. Under the transnational approach via Model D, the organisations concentrate on both globally responsive and locally responsive through knowledge transfers across national borders. Hence, a transnational or geocentric approach could be a viable alternative international employee resourcing and assignment policy of Jones Corporation.
However, there is a number of issues surrounding global mobility including the effect on the lifestyles of employees and their relatives and families, cost of immigration and increased cost of training, time complexity and compensation for relocation.
It is advised to Jones Corporation adopt the geocentric approach of employee resourcing so that it can recruit and select transnational managers or top executives from any place in the world. Jones Corp may use the International recruitment graduate programme may be utilised for recruiting a global workforce. It is wise to use a formal approach for the recruitment of international employees.
Attaining a geocentric or transnational status may encourage managers of multinational companies to hunt for global solutions to the issue of regulating employment relations. Employment relations is more associated with the socio-economic association that evolve and form around an agreement between parties to work for specific employment benefits like remuneration, performance-linked bonus etc.
Thus, in the case of workforce continuing education and development, Jones Corp should introduce another form of cross-cultural awareness like a long-run commuter assignment to train mobile cadre for the overseas subsidiary. Thus, the recruitment practices of the company in the international area demand cross-cultural sensitivity. Knowledge of each country’s best recruitment strategy should be followed by Jones Corp to select and train the best employees who understand Jones Corp’s culture and traditions.