The configuration of employee retention practices in multinational corporations' foreign subsidiaries

B. Sebastian Reiche

International Business Review, 2008, vol. 17, issue 6, 676-687

Abstract: This paper contributes to turnover research by deriving a typology of retention practices and investigating their applicability in multinational corporations' (MNCs) foreign subsidiaries in the light of home- and host-country effects. Linking institutional and strategic HRM perspectives, the paper then proposes a conceptual framework examining how MNCs can maximize their retention capacity. Specifically, MNCs need to align their transferable home-country retention practices with overall strategy and complement them with flexible context-specific practices to allow for adaptability across different subsidiaries. It is further argued that characteristics of the headquarters-subsidiary relationship will influence the relative importance of context-generalizable versus context-specific retention practices and that the relevant set of practices for each subsidiary then needs to be configured individually.

Keywords: Employee; retention; Home-; and; host-country; effects; MNC; subsidiaries; Strategic; HRM; Transfer; of; HR; practices (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

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