Geocentric Staffing

Abstract

Multinational corporations (MNCs) can staff their subsidiaries with parent country nationals (employees from the home country), host country nationals (employees from the subsidiary location), third country nationals (employees from a country other than the home or host country) or some mix thereof. The debate regarding the value of each of these groups originated with Perlmutter, who suggested that an MNC can hold an ethnocentric, polycentric or geocentric managerial orientation. This framework has become a guiding model in the field of global staffing. Here we trace the evolution of the debate, beginning with Perlmutter, moving on to strategic international human resource management and the tension between global integration and local responsiveness, and finally to current issues regarding knowledge creation and transfer. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of MNCs' choice of managerial orientation on global staffing.