GSBS6007 Managing HR in

International Organisations

Assessment 1

ASSESSMENT TYPE

Essay, 2500 words (2000-2500 words excluding references).

PURPOSE

Research academic sources to identify and use key arguments in the field of international HRM
and articulate the implications for management practice.

DESCRIPTION

Focusing on an investigation of significant topics in the international human resource

management field, students critically apply theories, principles and methodologies to
analyse the literature and to justify well-supported conclusions. Students demonstrate
critical thinking and analytical problem solving skills to develop explanations and arguments to
reach a solution. Students will be advised on a limited choice of topics based on the material
covered in the unit at this point in the trimester.

SUBMISSION

Online via Turnitin (see Blackboard, Assessment folder). Essays with similarity score above
35% will not be marked. Essays suspected being written by someone else will not be marked
but will be send to revelant services for investigation.
ASSESSMENT CRITERIA

Four criteria will be used to grade this assignment (a detailed marking rubric is also provided in
the Assesment folder of Blackboard)
1. Research (40%)
2. Argument (40%)
3. Structure & Writing Clarity (10%)
4. Referencing (10%)

ADVICE

For general advice: please refer your NBS Student Manual for advice on: Researching, Critical
Thinking, Referencing, Academic Writing & Academic Essays.
For this specific task, you need to identify an IHRM topic that interests you (from the topics
you have covered so far in the trimester i.e. one of the following:
1. The Cultural Context of IHRM
2. The Organisational Context of IHRM
3. IHRM in Cross-Border M&A, International Alliances and SMEs
4. Sourcing HR for Global Markets: Staffing, Recruitment and Selection

RESEARCH QUESTION AND FORMAT

Define a question
To be able to “critically apply theories”, you need to choose a research question. This question
does not need to be novel and outstandling original. This question can be relatively broad but
because of the space restrictions, you may want to indicate early on that you will attempt to
answer that question focusing on something more narrow, for the sake of the argumentation.
For instance, questions could be “what are the antecedents of… on …”, “how… shapes….”,
“what are the consequences of … after / on …” etc. The question is supposed to be related to
the first weeks of content and used the models and theories disccused in the course (or more
picked from the literature). Without a question, you are taking the risk to write a relatively
descriptive essays that does not leave you enough space to be analytical and critical.
Format of the essay
One of the documents in the useful resources or advice recommends not using headings. I
would tend to disagree with that. My apologies for sharing without correcting this particular
point. The structure of the essay is relatively free but try to pay attention to how logical it
appears to the reader. Please use the APA format and make the effort to use academic
literature, lots of research has been shared to help you starting (see advice document for names
of relevant journals).
Introduction
Please write an introduction of a reasonable length (neither very short nor abusively long). Take
no more than 500 words as a rule of thumb. The introduction would ideally define all the key
concepts before discussing them. Also, some contextual information (numbers, general
facts) about the phenomenon you chose to focus on would make the essay more convincing
upfront. The introduction should allow to answer, at least to some extent, to the following
questions: Is this problem important? Frequent? Topical? Why should the reader care? The
introduction should clearly mention the research question and preferably announce the structure
of the rest of the essay (“first I will …, second, …, add name of concepts or theories involved
when relevant).
Heading 1 here
To help you to structure your essay in a very clear manner, I encourage you to use heading in
the core of the essay. Between the blocks, make sure that you have a transition sentence to
explain how / why we are going from block 1 to block 2, from 2 to 3, etc. Two or three blocks of
theory related content would be common. In total, the theory part could represent 1000-1250
words.
Contemporary IHRM practice implications
In this specific section, you would extract the theories discussed above to answer you
research questions and translate them into actions / practical implications /
recommendations to managers etc. For instance, how does this topic shape contemporary
IHRM practice? Critically appraise the implications/influence on contemporary practice i.e.
explain the so what? Why do international HR managers need to know this and what are the
implications for what managers in multinational companies actually do in relation to your chosen
area of IHRM?
Count about 500 words. Please avoid bullet points here and in general.

Conclusion
Here a summary and highlights of the essay could be presented shortly in 250.

COMMON WEAKNESSES

1) The research question is often too vague. Culture and IHRM could cover the entire course. If
so, there is probably something to change. For you to be able to demonstrate your ability to
discuss the mechanisms of a problem and find the practical solutions of this very same problem,
you need to be able to formulate your own question / find your own problem. A piece of advice
on that front would be: start small. Culture and IHRM would be a book, practical implications
related to culture and IHRM would be endless. Pick something more specific and think about
how this research question is manageable at all levels: definitions / facts / theories and
mechanisms / practice.
2) The essay is one big piece of text with long paragraphs and without even a title. Help the
reader, choose a title that reflects the topic of your essay, define a structure with
headings. Note that you don’t have to but it does help and force you to be very structured, to
write transitions between sections, to keep the coherence explicit for the reader. Try to make
relatively short paragraphs (about 6 sentences) that say only one thing. Try to keep the
paragraphs relatively homogeneous.
3) The essay does not contain any theory / model / mechanism or if so none of these are
applied to a specific topic. Example: describing the Hofstede’s dimensions without discussing
their validity or applying them to, for instance, training or recruitment or M&As success etc. The
essay is supposed to demonstrate your ability to be analytical and critical so bring something on
the table, a bit of you, rather than summarising only what someone’s else said.
4) Some did not paraphrase enough while using academic content. Be aware that it could be
considered as research misconduct.
5) Tables are used to replace content (and often the most important part of the essay). Tables
are a very powerful tool and it is strongly encouraged to use them to structure your thoughts and
findings but they do not replace a written analysis. In that case, add your table in appendix (to
exclude them from the word count) and comment your table in the text.

SEARCH AND JOURNALS

This is a research essay requiring you to search academic journals and other sources (quality is
better than quantity). You should primarily search the academic journals listed below.
International Journal of Human Resource Management
Journal of International Business Studies
International Business Review
Management International Review
Journal of World Business
Journal of Global Mobility
Cross Cultural Management: An International Journal
International Journal of Cross Cultural Management
Human Resource Management
Human Resource Management Journal
Human Resource Management Review
Academy of Management Journal
Academy of Management Review
Asia Pacific Journal of Human Resources
California Management Review
International Journal of Employment Studies
Organization Studies
Journal of Management Studies
Journal of Management
Journal of Applied Management Studies
Journal of Applied Psychology
Personnel Review