years ago all employees were given the right to subscribe to a convertible
debenture scheme, something that about 40% of staff world-wide have
taken up. Perhaps most significantly, an individual performance-related pay
scheme, in which an employee’s performance is assessed against specified
targets, affects all employees across the group world-wide. These variable
forms of compensation appear to have much in common with practices
which have become popular in America and Britain during the last two
decades.
A similar process of adopting ‘Anglophone’ style practices was evident
in relation to management development. In recent years the HQ has made a
concerted effort to develop a cadre of managers recruited from across the
MNC. Subsidiaries have been encouraged to submit suggestions for indivi-
duals who should be considered for promotion to positions elsewhere in the
firm, a group known as ‘high potentials’. The identification of such ‘high
potentials’ as part of an international cadre of managers is, according to
Ferner and Varul (1999), a common trait of British and American MNCs.
More generally, in Swedco the British operations appear to have been parti-
cularly influential in the formation of policy on management development.
The manager of the firm’s ‘Management Institute’ indicated that the UK sub-
sidiary and UK universities have been influential in developing policy on train-
ing programmes and management development:‘When I am developing a training programme for managers, I always include the
UK. Firstly, it ensures I get the language right but, secondly, there are a lot of
good training and management development ideas in the UK that I would like
to benefit from. I always bring someone in from the UK site on to the team. We
are also developing links with the UK universities such as Cranfield and LSE.’In summary, while there is evidence of the country of origin being influ-
ential over the way Swedco manages its international workforce, there is also
evidence that senior managers in the firm perceive the USA and the UK as
providing practices in the area of performance management and manage-
ment development that were seen as being desirable. This process of reverse
transfer – arguably reflecting the perceptions of key actors of dominant
systems – can be seen as constituting an erosion of the country-of-origin effect.For a more detailed discussion, see Hayden and Edwards (2001)International integrationThe third element of the framework concerns the extent to which MNCs are
internationally integrated, defined as the generation of inter-unit linkages
across borders. A number of recent developments has created scope for MNCs
to build stronger linkages between their international operations. In relation to
product markets, differences in consumer tastes appear to have narrowed – a
process to which the advertising and marketing strategies of MNCs themselves
have contributed – while there has also been a trend toward deregulation of
400 International Human Resource Management