This increased variety of employees presents all sorts of new challenges for the

selection, preparation, deployment, and management of a global workforce. Not the

least of these is the increased need by all managers and for IHR managers in
particular for increasing their cross-cultural awareness, knowledge, and skills, their
foreign language ability, and their overall management competency within this new
international setting.
For example, rms have much to learn about how to manage the performance of a
global workforce. The performance management of traditional expatriates,
themselves, is not always handled well (this is discussed in Chapter 12), even though
many global enterprises have many years of experience dealing with them. But the
cross-national interaction among all the many different types of international
employees described in this chapter and between global managers and IEs creates
many new performance management problems, which become even more difcult as
the variety of employees expands. All of these become critical concerns: the impact
of national culture on performance and how it is dened, on standards for
performance, on the review-ability of reviewers, on who reviews (their cultural
experience and savvy), etc.
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Pay and support services are also likely to be structured differently for a short-term
business traveler sent on an assignment for six months to nalize the start-up of a
new foreign subsidiary than for a manager sent for three, four, or ve years to run
such a subsidiary. Differences would also be pretty important between the pay and
support services of the immigrant or foreign student (and each of these would be
different from each other) hired to return home to work in a foreign subsidiary in
comparison with a person who makes a career out of moving from one foreign
assignment to another. Compensation issues are discussed in more depth in
Chapter 11.
The rest of the chapters in Part II will discuss the many problems of selecting,
training, compensating, and managing this complex and varied global workforce.
To the extent that it is possible, exemplary practices around the world will be
described. And where such examples are lacking, the chapters will provide what
information is available to aid IHRM in its strategic management of the global
workforce.
Some of the types of questions that IHR and the global enterprise need to address in
order to better manage their global workforces are suggested here to help guide the
reader as she or he reads the rest of the chapters in this book. Some of these types of
questions, providing descriptions of exemplary practices relative to the selection,
preparation, and management of traditional expatriates, are nally being addressed.
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But, as the rest of the chapters will demonstrate, there is still a strong need for
additional research and observation. Indeed, even the traditional focus on three basic
reasons for the use of international employees (to ll positions for technology
transfer, for management development to develop international business competency,
and to coordinate and control foreign operations) is no longer adequate.
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The
questions include the following:
111
2
3
4
5
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7
8
9
10
1
2
3111
4
5
6
7
8
9
20
1
2
3
4
5111
6
7
8
9
30
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
40
1
2
3
4
5111
Global workforce planning 225