Strategic Human Resource Management

Section Two

Globally Competent Managers

A growing area of strategic importance is the recruitment,
selection, and development of globally competent managers.
Nancy Adler and Susan Bartholomew have studied the human
resource requirements for “transnationally competent
managers” who have global understandings of business and
broad cultural knowledge. Such managers have the flexibility to
live in different cultural environments, can interact
simultaneously with individuals from several different cultures,
and have an egalitarian view of colleagues from other
countries. A staffing goal would be to have a rich mixture of
such managers from different countries, fluent in several
languages, who use world-class standards for performance
benchmarks. In order to acquire such managers, human
resource managers must hire world-class individuals from
throughout the world; develop them through transnational
assignments; prepare them for organizational learning roles,
such as in strategic alliances; and remove any glass ceiling
limitations on promotions based on home country con-
siderations. Unfortunately, Adler and Bartholomew found that
most human resource operations in U.S. and Canadian
multinational corporations do not meet these requirements.^48