People Management Issues

People are major players in designing, implementing and utilizing information systems. When investigating the human resources management in the global business environment, a number of areas need to be considered as crucial to the success of globalization. These areas are recruiting, training, organizational learning, cross-cultural skills development, and global team development (Lan, 2002).

Recruiting

Hiring employees for a global organization is not as easy as for domestic companies. The recruitment process requires careful planning to provide the best strategy for the global organization in obtaining suitable employees for appropriate positions and locations. For example, Unhelkar (2002) has suggested the importance of "best fit" approach to recruitment. In preparation of the global recruitment plan, the organization's human resources department needs to firstly transform itself into the global operation. Traditionally, human resources is quite independent and unique system for each subsidiary in multinational corporations (MNCs). For example, the human resources department in the Sydney subsidiary may have no relationships or connections with the human resources department in Tokyo of the same MNC. In addition, each subsidiary's human resources department may maintain its own operations that may be enough to fulfill the local requirements, but certainly would not have the flexibility to facilitate the management of employees in the global scale. This uniqueness of human resources function in the traditional organization leaves the organization with no centralized control and standardized operations in regard to people management. By implementing a global human resources system, MNCs would benefit in efficiently managing geographical by dispersed employees as well as standardizing the organizations' employment policies.

In the global recruitment aspect, the Internet seems to be the appropriate operating platform. The implementation of corporation's careers Website is considered the key success factor in improving the speed, efficiency and effectiveness of the overall recruiting process. Further, the careers Website has a profound impact on the organization's global recruitment strategy in the following areas (Jones, 2001):

  1. Branding and sourcing - it provides the potential candidates a comprehensive and concentrated source of information and branding experience on the organization as an employer.

  2. Response management - it provides a standardized application for candidates from various sources and maintains a centralized database for the ongoing relationships.

  3. Assessment - to reduce the organization's costs and time, extra features can be incorporated into the careers Website for pre-screening and filtering the candidates.

  4. Processing - it streamlines the processes of people/employee management by connecting the careers Web site to the organization's back-end systems.

Training

Training is a critical agenda for organizations to continuously improve the quality perspective in products, services and management aspects, and strengthens organizations in the global competitive edge. In designing and developing the training programs, a number of factors are identified to ensure the appropriateness and effectiveness. These factors include:

  1. Stage in the global transition process - as there are various stages in the global transition process, the training development needs to reflect to the various skills required by employees carrying out tasks in different stages.

  2. Target employee domains - different levels and types of employees would play different roles in the organization's global transition process. Considering the types of employees and their respective situations, the suitable training programs could be developed to enhance the employee skills and serve the requirements of globalization.

  3. Methods of training - implementing training programs across national borders have significant level of complexity and budget requirements. By applying technology (such as computer based training programs, or online training) to develop and deliver the training programs would allow the employees to participate in learning anywhere and anytime. However, the standardized training programs may require some variations, for example in languages and cultural aspects to fit in the foreign subsidiary contexts.

Organizational Learning

In today's challenging business marketplace, organizational learning seems to become one of the prominent aspects that enterprises would like to focus on and incorporate in their business strategies. As the enterprise evolves, many changes have transpired and demanded for resolutions. These changes are often associated with leadership and management styles, implication of technology, and the business environment. Because of swift technological development, enterprises are capable of applying knowledge management, and through the online learning environment to promote organizational learning. Laudon and Laudon (2002) define knowledge management as "the process of systematically and actively managing and leveraging the stores of knowledge in the organization." The key information systems that support knowledge management include office automation systems (OAS), knowledge work systems (KWS), group collaboration systems, and artificial intelligence systems (AI).

Cross-Cultural Skills Development

In multinational corporations, business units and subsidiaries are often spread across nations and have quite distinct cultural attitudes and characteristic. Hence, employees in global companies are more likely to have greater chances of dealing with foreign colleagues than non-multinational companies. In order to smoothen the communications and information flows between employees from different cultural backgrounds, global corporations should consider the introduction of multi-cultural skills development programs. These programs may consist of language and communication learning, and recognizing and understanding of culture differences.

Global Team Development and Leadership Styles

Collaboration and coordination are the two imperative ingredients of successfully conducting teamwork in the global organization. Coordination refers to the extra tasks required for amalgamating tasks performed to accomplish the final goal, while collaboration deals with multiple teams working jointly toward the same objective. In global projects, teams or even members of the team mainly come from different countries or regions. In order to succeed in global coordination and collaboration, there is a need to establish the common standards in terms of communication method, language, management rules, and information technologies (hardware platforms and software applications).

Four possible team organizational models (see Figure 5) can be applied in the global projects namely pyramid, breakthrough, open architects, and synchronous paradigms (Thomsett, 1994).


Figure 5: Four global team organizational models

  1. Pyramid - has its roots in the industrial age. Projects are decomposed into functions, similar to how a business is decomposed into business functions, such as R&D, engineering, manufacturing, marketing, sales, distribution, accounting, and finance, with all the functions reporting to the same executive. A single person, the project manager, is responsible for the project and has the authority to make decisions. All team members are directly accountable to the project manager.

  2. Breakthrough - involves teams of random creative independents. Team members do not wait for guidelines or directions, and have clear objectives in mind. For better performance, the breakthrough model requires freedom from interference, and freedom to investigate problems. This model is suggested for small-sized, short-term, and simple projects that do not require intensive coordination of interdependent units.

  3. Open architects - Members of this team model work collaboratively toward the project objectives. Functional roles are well defined in the team and rotated among team members. Software development teams are suggested to adopt the open architects model for making collaboration and consensus engineering more efficient and controllable (Constantine, 1995).

  4. Synchronous paradigm - Team members share the common vision with the leader. The level of alignment with the common value and vision is the key to eliminate the tight control of any kind and increase the efforts made by each individual. Hence, the leader of this team model has less workload in supervising and guiding the team members to carry out their responsibilities.



Managing Globally with Information Technology
Managing Globally with Information Technology
ISBN: 193177742X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2002
Pages: 224

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