Center for International Human Resource Studies

Research

CONTACT

Center for International Human Resource Studies

Dr. Elaine Farndale
Center Director, Center for International Human Resource Studies

EMAIL: cihrs@psu.edu
PHONE: +1 814-865-5425
FAX: +1 814-867-4169

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IHRM Webinar Series

The challenges of 2020 inspired a group of friends and colleagues at Simon Fraser University (Canada), Penn State (USA), and ESCP Business School (Germany, France) to organize a series of webinars focusing specifically on international HRM topics. The webinars showcase distinguished scholars from all over the world and are an amazing resource to spark research creativity and shed light on upcoming topics in international HRM, as well as being a valuable resource for you to share with your students as a part of the course or an additional resource for them to use.

Feel free to share this link with your colleagues and students, and please subscribe to the YouTube Channel to be notified of new content!

The complexity of who we are: using an identity lens in IHRM studies

April 23, 2024

Save the Date! IHRM Webinar Series presented by Dan Caprar

Join us on April 23, 2024, for the next installment of our IHRM Webinar Series presented by Dan Caprar, Associate Professor at The University of Sydney Business School in Australia. Dan will discuss "The complexity of who we are: using an identity lens in International HRM studies". You can pre-register now through Eventbrite!

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Modern slavery: Why should HR scholars care?

February 29, 2024

Modern slavery is widespread. Hardly any country is immune to it, and almost no industry is shielded from it. Both formal and informal economies breed it. Some of it is found domestically, some of it crosses borders.

Modern slavery is typically viewed as a societal issue; it is enabled by socioeconomic, institutional, and geographical factors. It is, however, also an organizational phenomenon - modern slavery thrives because certain organizational actors are involved, particular business conditions exist, and specific management capabilities and practices are utilized. Modern slavery can creep into the employment relationship, making labor commodification extreme. Hence, it becomes an inherently HR issue.

This webinar will offer insights into (the business of) modern slavery. The talk will argue that unless modern slavery is understood as a business, there would be minimal chance of ending it. Persisting myths will be discussed briefly, and a reasoning behind some assumptions will be put forward. A case will be made for why HR scholars are well-positioned to pursue lines of inquiry related to modern slavery. Just because the phenomenon has remained largely under their radar so far and because research challenges endure, it doesn’t need to, and indeed, it shouldn’t be that way.

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Wanderlust to Wonderland? Insights into the EU research project GLOMO

January 25, 2024

This webinar will present research findings from the Horizon 2020 project GLOMO and provide insights into the management of an international consortium of over 80 people from academia, politics, and business. Although labor mobility addresses the growing labor and skills shortages in many countries, expatriates encounter various challenges and barriers to their international careers. Employment prospects for expatriates are often lower than for local workers, and overqualification is widespread. As a result, expatriates’ potential for growth is currently far from being realized. To increase the efficiency and benefits of existing labor mobility for all stakeholders, the GLOMO project aimed to improve our understanding of global labor mobility at the societal (macro), organizational (meso), and individual (micro) levels. At these three levels, the 15 research sub-projects examined careers prior to expatriation, relevant international career capital, the career outcomes of expatriates, and the overall sense-making process. During this webinar, you will gain a deeper insight into the motives, goals, dynamics, and barriers to global labor mobility and international careers.

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Incorporating Social Responsibility and Sustainability into IHRM Teaching

December 7, 2023

In this webinar participants will learn how to incorporate social responsibility and sustainability into the design and delivery of international HRM (IHRM) courses. We will start by clarifying the “what” and the “why” of infusing responsibility and sustainability principles into IHRM curricula: What are we talking about? And why does it matter? In this part of the webinar we will discuss how to best conceptualize social responsibility and sustainability in the context of IHRM and look at existing frameworks that can be used to guide students’ learning around what is needed to tackle global sustainability challenges. We will further discuss why is it critical to design IHRM strategies and practices that promote sustainability and social responsibility – and why it is important to educate students, executives and HR leaders about how to best accomplish this. The remaining time will be devoted to the “how”-question: Which pedagogical approaches and learning activities work for different students? What are suitable readings, cases, and exercises? And how to make the learning stick?

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Global Strategies, Local Connections: Navigating Gender Diversity Management

October 26, 2023

This webinar delves into the multifaceted role played by informal social networks in shaping organizational approaches to gender diversity management. These informal networks act as vital intermediaries, exerting a significant influence on how institutional mechanisms impact organizational strategies for managing gender diversity and fostering inclusion. Interestingly, while institutions certainly wield influence over structures and their outcomes, it is informal networks that ultimately define the dynamics and pathways that enable the establishment and effectiveness of these institutions. Hence, any comprehensive understanding of organizational approaches to gender diversity management must inherently incorporate the intricate interplay with informal networks, and this relationship is reciprocal.

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Using Works of Art To Illustrate Ways of Knowing in IHRM

September 28, 2023

This seminar focuses on an innovative teaching method to explain ways of knowing and research paradigms (i.e., positivism, interpretivism, and critical theory) in Master and PhD courses. The method consists of using works of art to illustrate these paradigms, an initiative launched originally by the French philosopher Michel Foucault. Despite Foucault's influence on Management, this is a unique pedagogical initiative in IHRM. The method helps clarify and make more accessible some notions and issues which tend to be challenging to grasp for students (and researchers) without a philosophical background. The use of paintings (and other non-academic sources) can help students distinguish various ways of knowing in IHRM and reinforces information provided in more academic-oriented texts. This can, in turn, trigger the utilization of different research paradigms in an area like ours that is often accused of being overly biased and/or dominated by positivist positions.

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So you want to do research on equity/equality, diversity & inclusion in IHR

May 25, 2023

This webinar is for you if you’re already pursuing EDI research in international business, or if you want to do so in the future. We’ll share results from the first systematic review of EDI in international business (IB), now conditionally accepted at JIBS (authors Stella Nkomo, Mustafa Ozbilgin, David C. Thomas & Stacey Fitzsimmons).

Multinational enterprises (MNEs) are being pressured to address equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI); modern IHRM research must therefore also address EDI. Our purpose is to evaluate how well existing IB research on EDI will help MNEs answer future demands for global equality and social justice. Our results are based on both a text analysis of 1622 articles, comparing EDI research within and outside of IB, and a narrative review of 101 articles within IB. Among other conclusions, we call for more morality-based and power-laden analysis in the future, and suggest how to do so. At the intersection of IB and EDI research, we see the opportunity to help MNEs proactively lead societal change in the countries where they operate.

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Let's talk about language!

April 27, 2023

People, not organizations, speak languages. This webinar introduces language-sensitive research in IB and explains why and how it emerged. It provides an overview of current state of knowledge and discusses potential avenues for future (interdisciplinary) research.

During this webinar, we will problematize the way translation has been treated in quantitative and qualitative IB research. Instead, translation is offered as an approach that has implications both for theory development as well as methodological advances in IB and the IHRM field.

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Informal Network Research in International HRM

March 16, 2023

Informal networks are a societal phenomenon that can be a significant obstacle to the effectiveness of international managers and expatriates. However, informal networks can simultaneously enable and facilitate business activities and support the efficiency and effectiveness of managerial actions. While informal networking has been universally regarded as an important feature of expatriate effectiveness, respective network constructs as well as the act of networking abroad, remain weakly understood when taking expatriates’ ability to connect to local networks into account.

This webinar will showcase conceptual and empirical research on informal networks in International HRM. Its purpose is to create awareness that informal networking is not only relevant to the field of expatriate management but also to the broader trend towards global mobility and social cohesion in diverse and pluralistic societies.

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Time is on our side? Towards more time-sensitive research in IHRM

February 23, 2023

Time is an essential and classic, yet underdeveloped issue in IHRM studies. However, time has an often long and distinguished pedigree in a number of scientific disciplines such as philosophy, physics, sociology, psychology, and organization studies. They constitute rich sources of inspiration and refreshment for the field of IHRM. From these sources crucial general anchor points emerge that lead to yardsticks for the degree of time-sensitivity of IHRM research. They point us towards specific routes for enriching our studies with temporal aspects that allow a more comprehensive and in-depth view on the phenomena IHRM is dealing with.

After briefly diagnosing the current situation in terms of time and IHRM studies, this webinar focuses on outlining the general anchor points and specific yardsticks for more time-sensitive IHRM research. It closes with major calls for the field of IHRM to further develop in this area.

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Surviving Challenging Fieldwork Without Losing Your Mind (and Soul)

January 19, 2023

Researchers undertaking fieldwork in fragile contexts are often required to immerse themselves among people and events that can be tough to observe, interpret, and write up. The complexity of such work is likely to elicit powerful and potentially harmful emotional responses for the researcher that, if untreated or unrecognised, can leave them at risk of compassion fatigue. In this webinar, I draw attention to the emotional well-being of the vulnerable researcher. I focus on the ethics review process and argue that current institutional structures are generally insufficient to adequately prepare, monitor, and support researchers to confidently undertake fieldwork in fragile contexts. Using an ethics approach, I draw theoretically from scholars in other disciplines who pay critical attention to these issues and, using their analyses, I present an 'Ethics Framework for Vulnerable Researchers' that maps how interventions and strategies can be applied to the field of IHRM. My intention is to spur an honest and transparent conversation to overcome a 'culture of silence' about the personal difficulties vulnerable researchers face in coping with arduous fieldwork.

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Adjustment Reimagined!

October 26, 2022

Expatriate adjustment has been extensively studied in the international business literature over the last 3 decades, and several reviews and meta-analyses have provided many good insights about this topic. Because of this progress, some scholars have suggested moving away from adjustment and focusing on other expatriate experiences. In this webinar, we argue for continued research on adjustment but from a reimagined perspective. After briefly reviewing what we currently know about adjustment, we will discuss opportunities for additional work in this area with implications not only for international HRM scholarship but also for the broader organizational behavior and management literature.

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Translating IHRM Research for Practical Impact

October 19, 2022

Increasingly, IHRM scholars are being asked to demonstrate the impact of their research beyond academic networks. In some countries (e.g., U.K., Australia), demonstration of research impact is being introduced as a metric for academic research performance. Research impact is also important for business school accreditation; for example, AACSB International has standards for business schools to demonstrate their contributions to societal needs. For many of us, however, engaging with industry partners, maintaining online social media accounts, and publishing in practitioner-oriented journals, are areas outside our 'comfort zone'. This webinar will host a panel of experts whose research is highly impactful. The panel members will share their experiences, insights, and best practices for translating IHRM research for practitioners and broader audiences.

Panel chair: Helen De Cieri, Monash Business School, Monash University

Panelists:

  • Betina Szkudlarek, The University of Sydney, Australia
  • Sebastian Reiche, IESE, Spain
  • Paula Caligiuri, Northeastern University, USA
  • Lauren Locklear, Texas Tech University, USA

 

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Questioning Elitism in International Human Resource Management Studies

September 15, 2022

I will argue that IHRM (like business and management studies in general and human resource management studies specifically) has operated from an elitist base: that has not only led to a distortion in our research but has led to some unwanted, negative and even nefarious outcomes. This has been caused by our focus on the interests of owners of businesses (when the vast majority of people are not owners); on large international organizations (when 95% of people work in small local ones); on managers and executives (when 80% of people are neither); on talent management (when 95% of people are not classed as talent); on western organizations (when most of the world does not fit into that category); on employed people (when increasing proportions of workers are outside employment); on indigenous populations (when increasing numbers are migrants); etc. What this means is that we have largely ignored the problems and issues of most people in the world. I will suggest that focusing on the non-elite will avoid contributing further to the negative impact our work has created so far and positively address some of the Grand Challenges that the world is facing.

Chris Brewster, Professor of International Human Resource Management at Henley Business School, University of Reading, UK.

Is International Human Resource Management (IHRM) under the resource-based view too relevant to be left to IHRM scholars? How IHRM can (re)gain the scholarly high ground.

June 24, 2022

The resource-based view argues that sustainable competitive advantage derives from developing superior capabilities and resources. For organizations, no other resource is as relevant as human resources – and in times of globalization this implies international human resources. As a consequence, strategy research moved increasingly away from a microeconomics to a behavioral paradigm. This should have implied golden times for (I)HRM scholarship. But was this the case? Probably not. One could gain the impression that international human resources are perceived as simply too relevant to be left to IHRM scholars. After briefly retracing the development of IHRM as a scholarly field, this webinar puts forward suggestions of how to make IHRM scholarship more relevant.

Markus Pudelko Director of the Department of International Business at Tübingen University School of Business and Economics, Germany.

Ethnography in International Business: Theorizing from Fieldwork to Theory in Complex Cultural Contexts

April 12, 2022

This webinar is for anyone interested in using ethnography either alone or together with other research methods to build theory on the effects of culture in today’s global and multicultural business contexts. Understanding how culture affects international human resource issues such as global teaming, communication across cultures, language management, work culture integration, strategic talent management, and a multitude of other organizational processes is critical to IB scholarship and practice. Yet, armed with only superficial measures of national cultural differences proliferated by easy-to-use, statistically testable, cultural dimensions offered by aggregate values-based models of culture (e.g., Hofstede, Schwartz, and The Globe study) IB scholars find themselves stereotype rich and operationally poor where culture meets IB context. Such quantitative data give few insights into the challenge of understanding the complex cultural phenomena. The term “culture” is often used synonymously with national culture in the field of IB, yet it is in fact a multi-faceted and complex construct involving the coming together of various spheres of culture including national, regional, institutional, organizational, functional, etc. enacted by individuals on an ongoing basis.
Research settings in international business are therefore rife with multilevel cultural interactions due to diverging cultural assumptions brought together in real time by the merging (often virtually) of individuals (often multicultural themselves) across distance and differentiated contexts. Consequently, traditional positivist approaches to understanding culture fall short of adequately capturing the complexity of cultural phenomena in international organizations. Ethnography with its two essential elements—fieldwork, including its central methodological building block of participant observation, and its focus on culture—is the most effective method for gaining insights into such microlevel embedded cultural phenomena. Drawing from work-in-progress on her new book on ethnography in international business (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press), Professor Brannen will address three distinct analytical modes of ethnographic inquiry relative to IB theorizing building with increasing scope from the most micro level of analysis—that of a single organization—building up to the global strategic context of the multinational corporation.

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IHRM research: It's time to review, reset, and re-imagine!

March 3, 2022

Drawing from their recent reviews of 60 years of research in international and comparative HRM, published in Human Resource Management (2021) and the Asia Pacific Journal of Human Resources (2021), Helen De Cieri and Karin Sanders will discuss and raise questions such as:

  • How do we define the field of International and Comparative HRM?
  • What are the three identified research streams within the field?
  • What has been studied within the field of international and comparative HRM, with regard to theoretical frameworks, concepts investigated, and research methods used?
  • Which perspectives have been privileged and which have been ignored, with regard to authors and participants in research?
  • Are there features that are specific to research on international and comparative HRM in the Asia Pacific context?
  • If we view the COVID-19 pandemic as a catalyst for a 'great re-set', how should we re-imagine the field of IHRM?

The speakers will discuss such questions and encourage researchers and practitioners to examine challenges and opportunities in IHRM.

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Migration & Business: Current Issues & Future Trends

January 20, 2022

Over the past decades, global migration patterns have been undergoing significant, although often underestimated, transformations. The directionality, geographic spread, climate and urban migration, and skills involved have resulted in changes in demand and supply of the workforce. In turn, this has affected corporate human resource management and social sustainability practices as well as the diversity, inclusion, and internationalization strategies of firms. In this presentation, Aida Hajro and Milda Zilinskaite address the implications of these changes for the activities of multinational enterprises and highlight many unanswered questions and avenues for future research.

The presentation is based on evidence from the interdisciplinary literature and supported by the first-hand insights from the Advisory Board members – leading scholars, seasoned practitioners, and policy and human rights experts – of the international Migration, Business and Society (MBS) network. One of the MBS board members, Paul Baldassari, will be joining the presentation to share concrete managerial implications from his migration management experience as the Executive Vice President of Operations Strategy & Former Chief Human Resources Officer at the multinational electronics manufacturer Flex Ltd.

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Dr. Emma Parry, "Developing IHRM insight using effective cross-national research"

December 1, 2021

There is a long tradition in IHRM research of comparing countries, with national context now recognized as important in developing our understanding of undertaking HRM across different cultural and institutional settings. Accompanying the growth in international comparative HRM research is an increasing awareness of the many challenges that arise when simultaneously collecting comparable data across multiple countries. The methodological decisions relating to comparative research are well documented, but often more salient are the practical and collaborative challenges relating to projects aiming to provide valuable insights across countries. In this webinar, Professor Emma Parry will draw on her considerable experience in designing and undertaking comparative research projects and in managing international research networks such as Cranet and 5C. Emma, together with a panel of eminent scholars from IHRM, international management, and international careers will aim to address these challenges. She will emphasize the importance of taking a pragmatic approach to designing comparative research and discuss the lessons learned in areas such as data collection & sampling, selecting suitable partners, and managing an international network.

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Dr. Michael Morley, "How Have Management and HRM Scholars Shaped the Conversation on the COVID-19 Pandemic?"

October 26, 2021

Academic contributions on the COVID-19 pandemic and its consequences continue apace. As with most disciplines, scholars working in the organization sciences have turned their attention to this extraordinary phenomenon and have offered an array of insights designed to assist our understanding and management of the altered circumstances and attendant complexity thrown up by it. Based on a preliminary analysis of a corpus of scholarship published in selected Management and HRM journals, in this presentation, Professor Michael Morley will landscape the contours of this evolving body of work and its underlying intellectual structure. Through a performance analysis, he will identify key elements of the anatomy of the knowledge base built thus far, while in a textual analysis he will outline focal topics and shared qualities characterizing the contributions. Following this exposition and classification of the scholarship, he will turn to the identification of a series of research opportunities designed to either deepen recently established lines of inquiry or open up new ones of relevance to addressing the ongoing work, workplace, and work-life challenges that have arisen from the Covid 19 pandemic.

Professor Michael Morley holds the Chair in Management at the Kemmy Business School, University of Limerick, Ireland. His research interests encompass international, comparative, and cross-cultural HRM, which he explores at different levels. He has published several books with, among others, Butterworth-Heinemann, Oxford University Press, Palgrave Macmillan, and Routledge. His journal articles have appeared in a range of outlets in international business, management, organizational psychology and human resource management including Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of World Business, British Journal of Management, European Management Journal, Group & Organization Management, Human Relations, Personnel Psychology, European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, Human Resource Management, Human Resource Management Journal, Human Resource Management Review, and the International Journal of Human Resource Management. He is the current Editor-in-Chief of European Management Review, the journal of the European Academy of Management, and serves on the Editorial Boards of several other journals. He was elected as the 2007-2010 Chair of the Irish Academy of Management and the 2012-2014 President of the International Federation of Scholarly Associations of Management. He is a Fellow of the Irish Academy.

Moderator: Maral Muratbekova, Professor, Department of Management, ESCP Business School, Paris, France.

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Dr. Fang Lee Cooke, "Closer, Stronger, and Brighter—Bringing IB and IHRM Together"

September 21, 2021

International business (IB) and international human resource management (IHRM), the two fields of studies with a shared interest in multinational enterprises (MNEs), yet often criticized for the lack of dialogue and collaboration beneficial to extending the knowledge in these fields. At the same time, both IB and IHRM have expanded into the international development area, for example, there is growing interest in the role of MNEs in promoting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In this presentation, Dr. Fang Lee Cooke aims to address some of the critiques, challenge existing assumptions, and provide examples of research avenues that may critically examine the role of MNEs in promoting SDGs through their HRM practices from the perspective of developing countries.

Fang Lee Cooke is a Professor at Monash Business School, Monash University, and a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. Her research interests are in the area of strategic HRM, knowledge management and innovation, outsourcing, international HRM, diversity and inclusion management, employment relations, migrant studies, HRM in the healthcare sector, digitalization and implications for employment and HRM; climate change, energy transition and the future of work; Sustainable Development Goals and the role of multinational firms. Fang Lee Cooke's recent research projects examine some of the tensions, challenges, and implications associated with these topics for various key stakeholders such as the state, employers' associations, trade unions, workers, and labor NGOs.

Moderator: Elaine Farndale, Professor of Human Resource Management and Director of the School of Labor and Employment Relations, Pennsylvania State University (USA), and Founder and Director of the Center for International Human Resource Studies.

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Dr. Paula Caligiuri, 'How to Build Cultural Agility'

June 24, 2021

Cultural agility is the ability to work comfortably and effectively with people from different cultures. Based on her research and consulting, Paula Caligiuri will share training and development approaches that have worked to foster cultural agility.

Paula Caligiuri is a D’Amore-McKim School of Business Distinguished Professor of International Business and Strategy at Northeastern University. She is a work psychologist dedicated to helping companies, business teams, and executives become effective in today’s complex global environment. Researching in the areas of expatriate management, global leadership development, and cultural agility, Paula has authored or co-authored several articles and books – including Cultural Agility: Building a Pipeline of Successful Global Professionals and Build Your Cultural Agility. Her research is published in international business, human resource management, and psychology journals, including Journal of International Business, International Journal of Human Resource Management, Journal of World Business, Journal of Applied Psychology, Personnel Psychology, and International Journal of Intercultural Relations. She has served as an Area Editor for the Journal of International Business Studies and as a Senior Editor for the Journal of World Business.

Through TASCA Global, Paula works extensively with leading organizations and universities on the development of individuals’ culturally agility. She has been a frequent expert guest on CNN and CNN International and is an instructor for a LinkedIn Learning course entitled Managing Globally. In 2021, Paula was named a semi-finalist for the Forbes “50 over 50” for co-founding a public benefit corporation, Skiilify, to help foster cultural understanding more broadly.

Paula holds a Ph.D. from Penn State University in Industrial and Organizational Psychology and is a Fellow in both the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology and the Academy of International Business.

Moderator: Dr. Marion Festing, Professor of Human Resource Management and Intercultural Leadership at ESCP Business School, Berlin, Germany.

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Dr. Vlad Vaiman, 'The Rise of Fluid Work: Latest Developments and Implications for Talent Management

May 20, 2021

One of the most intriguing outcomes of the current coronavirus crisis is a visible increase in so-called "fluid work" around the world. Some experts argue that work within an organization becomes more fluid, as jobs are deconstructed and reinvented, permanent employees are offered inside gigs, and work is highly automated. In addition to that, organizational work boundaries become more fluid as well, since there are other types of workers - fluid workers representing an outside workforce - that some organizations are now using more than ever before. In his talk "The Rise of Fluid Work: Latest Developments and Implications for Talent Management" Dr. Vlad Vaiman will focus on fluid workers, discuss the latest rapid developments in this area on a global scale, present practitioners' view on the phenomenon, offer theoretical and managerial implications, and introduce a few areas for research in both global and country-level talent management related to the topic.

Vlad Vaiman is Professor and the Associate Dean at the School of Management of California Lutheran University and a visiting professor at several premier universities around the globe. He has published five books on managing talent in organizations and at a country level, as well as a number of academic and practitioner-oriented articles and book chapters on talent management and International HRM. His work appeared in Academy of Management Learning and Education, Human Resource Management, International Journal of Human Resource Management, Human Resource Management Review, Journal of Business Ethics, and many others. He is also a founding editor and the Chief Editorial Consultant of the European Journal of International Management, and an editorial board member of several prestigious academic journals, such as European Management Review, Human Resource Management Review, and Journal of Global Mobility, among others. He is a founder, co-organizer, and a leading chair of the EIASM Workshop on Talent Management and an editor of the Emerald Book Series on Talent Management.

Moderator: Dr. Elaine Farndale, Professor of Human Resource Management and Director of the Center for International Human Resource Studies at Penn State University, USA.

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Dr. Anne-Wil Harzing, 'Dare to be different! Why (IHRM) Research Needs to Change'

April 29, 2021

"Dare to be different" will be a different type of seminar. Rather than dealing with a specific research paper or topic, it will take participants on a journey of what needs changing in IHRM research. Although the presentation should be of interest to everyone, it is primarily aimed at early career researchers.

The seminar will discuss the need to broaden our population, improve our theoretical grounding, and take interdisciplinarity seriously. It will also suggest the use of novel research methods and research topics to address grand societal challenges, and more generally encourage researchers to dare to be different and critical. Throughout the seminar, examples from Anne-Wil Harzing's and other academics' research will be used so participants can follow up on the debates.

Drawing on Anne-Wil's own experience in her 30-year academic career in IHRM, the last third of the seminar will discuss how "daring to be different" might work out in practice and how to navigate academia as a PhD student/Early Career Researcher.

Anne-Wil Harzing’s research interests include international HRM, expatriate management, HQ-subsidiary relationships, cross-cultural management, transfer of HRM practices, the role of language in international business, the international research process, and the quality and impact of academic research.

The volume "Grands Auteurs en Management International" devotes an entire chapter to her contributions to the field of International Business. She is the youngest academic featured in the volume, which also includes prominent IB researchers such as John Dunning, Peter Buckley, Christopher Bartlett, CK Prahalad, Sumantra Ghoshal, Geert Hofstede, and Edward Hall.

In addition to her substantive research areas, Anne-Wil also has a keen interest in issues relating to journal quality and research performance metrics. In this context, she is the editor of the Journal Quality List and the provider of Publish or Perish, a software program that retrieves and analyses academic citations.

Anne-Wil has published or presented more than 160 books, book chapters, and academic papers about these topics in journals such as Journal of International Business Studies, Management International Review, International Business Review, Journal of World Business, European Journal of International Management, Journal of Organizational Behaviour, Human Resource Management, The International Journal of Human Resource Management, Organization Studies, Strategic Management Journal, The Academy of Management Learning & Education, European Journal of Information Systems, and Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology.

Moderator: Dr. Maral Muratbekova, Professor of Human Resource Management at ESCP Business School, Paris, France.

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Dr. B. Sebastian Reiche, 'How Global Leaders Advance Organizational Goals: The Power of Downward Deference'

March 11, 2021

Positional power is an integral element to achieve organizational goals. At the same time, there are important limits to formal hierarchy when it comes to advancing organizational goals, for example as leaders seek to penetrate and cultivate non-native markets where they have limited expertise. However, we know little about how global leaders get their work done. To advance our understanding of global leadership, positional power and social distance, I draw on results from a recent study that theorizes about how people with positional power enact downward deference—a practice of lowering oneself to be equal to that of lower power workers. An analysis of 115 top global leaders at a large U.S. company revealed that some leaders enacted downward deference when they recognized that they had less expertise, networks, and influence relative to their local subordinates. This manifested in two ways: 1) attempts to reduce social distance, which involved seeking connection, earning trust, and participating in adjacent collaboration with local subordinates; and, 2) yielding to subordinates’ expertise by privileging their judgement, transferring influence to them, and conforming to their local hierarchical expectations. Supplementary quantitative analyses showed that previous experiences in foreign cultures, both in terms of total time spent abroad and exposure to cultures that were distant from their own, correlated with adopting downward deference. Those leaders also had higher job performance ratings, and were promoted to higher executive levels over time compared to their counterparts who did not practice downward deference.

B. Sebastian Reiche (Ph.D., University of Melbourne, Australia) is Professor of People Management at IESE Business School in Barcelona, Spain. At IESE, he serves as Associate Director of Faculty, Academic Director of the Program for Management Development and is member of the Academic Committee for Executive Education. Sebastian is an expert on the forms, prerequisites and consequences of global work, international HRM, global leadership and knowledge transfer. His work has appeared in leading scholarly outlets, including Academy of Management Discoveries, Academy of Management Journal, Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of Management Studies, Organization Science, and Personnel Psychology, among others. Sebastian’s contributions have been acknowledged by the International HRM Scholarly Research Award of the Academy of Management in two consecutive years and the Journal of International Business Silver Medal, and have featured in the international press, including The Economist, Financial Times, BBC Capital, and Forbes. He has co-edited Readings and Cases in International Human Resource Management (6th edition, Routledge) and International Human Resource Management (5th edition, Sage). In addition, he serves as Associate Editor of Human Resource Management Journal and co-editor of Advances in Global Leadership. Sebastian has consulted with companies such as SAP, Haier, Wacker and Puig, and has designed, directed and delivered Custom Executive Education programs for a number of companies, including Boehringer Ingelheim, Deloitte, Allied Irish Banks, and Rijk Zwaan. Sebastian advises start-ups in the human capital space and regularly blogs on the topic of global work (blog.iese.edu/expatriatus).

Moderator: Dr. Maja Vidovic, Assistant Teaching Professor of Human Resource Management, CIHRS, Penn State, USA.

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Prof. Elaine Farndale and Mr. Andy Sivaraman, 'Deglobalization and High-Tech Talent: Understanding the interdependencies of corporate and governmental actions'

January 21, 2021

As corporate globalization has been restricted through changes in macro-environments, firms traditionally reliant on global talent pools are suffering. This is particularly true for high-tech firms’ seeking to source high-skilled STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) talent. In this webinar, we will explore the impact of macro-level trends in national government policy and political climates on high-tech firms seeking to source high-skilled STEM talent. By applying coevolutionary reasoning, we demonstrate the intricate interdependence between the macro environment and corporate strategizing. Based on qualitative research across the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, the day-to-day realities of talent management practitioners and industry experts will be shared. Overall, we identify emergent adaptations to corporate talent sourcing activities for dealing with increasing STEM shortages linked to deglobalization, explaining how these adaptations are a consequence of both internal strategic factors as well as external institutional forces.

Elaine Farndale is Professor of Human Resource Management and Associate Director of the School of Labor and Employment Relations, Pennsylvania State University (USA), where she is also Founder and Director of the Center for International Human Resource Studies. Elaine’s research focuses primarily on international human resource management, strategic HRM, and HRM and performance. She has published widely from her international collaborations in both the practitioner and top-ranked academic press, and has served as an elected member of the Academy of Management HR Division Executive Committee, Co-Editor for Routledge’s Global HRM Series, Co-Editor-in-Chief for Human Resource Management Journal, and Associate Editor for Human Resource Management and International Journal of Human Resource Management. Elaine completed her PhD at Cranfield School of Management (UK), and worked previously as an HR specialist for several years.

Andy Sivaraman is based in the USA and is a business leader with over twenty-five years of experience in enabling strategic business transformation through process and technology reengineering, organizational change and talent management during years of hyper-growth and technology-driven disruptions. He has been on the executive leadership team of global technology services companies and is currently Partner and Board Member of a digital transformation focused software product company. Andy has been a guest faculty at universities on technology and globalization, published white papers, articles in HR business magazines and a paper on "The Soft Side of Digital Transformation - The Connected Employee" in the South Asian Journal of Human Resource Management. Andy holds a BS in Physics & Mathematics and a Masters in Personnel Management & Industrial Relations.

Moderator: Dr. Miguel Olivas-Lujan, Teaching Professor of Human Resource Management, Associate Director of CIHRS, Penn State, USA.

Elaine and Andy flyer

Professor David Collings, 'Global Talent Management, Global Mobility and Covid-19: Where have we been and where are we going?'

November 19, 2020

The Covid-19 pandemic has significantly disrupted almost every industry and organization. As organizations that operate across national borders, multinational enterprises have been particularly impacted by the pandemic. Drawing insights from ongoing research on the role of HR in responding to the crisis and also on the role of learning and development in enabling the post-Covid workforce this session will reflect on what the pandemic means for global talent management and global mobility. It will provide some key thoughts on the directions which future research in this space could evolve to better understand these important phenomena.

Professor David Collings is Professor of HRM at Dublin City University Business School in Ireland where he is co-director of the Leadership and Talent Institute. He was due to be James M. Flaherty Visiting Professor at the Beedie School at Simon Fraser University this summer but his visit has been postponed owing to current circumstances. Prior to joining DCU, he held faculty positions at the University of Sheffield, and the National University of Ireland, Galway. He has been a visiting Fulbright Scholar at Cornell University and has also held visiting positions at King’s College London and Nanyang Business School in Singapore. He is a leading international expert on the future of work with a particular focus on talent management and global mobility. His work focuses on how organizations can develop more strategic approaches to managing talent and delivering sustainable performance. He is a regular speaker at corporate events and his recent speaking and consulting engagements include organisations such as the Abbott, Abbvie, the Danish Confederation of Industry, EADS Airbus, GE, Medtronic, Novartis and Stryker. He has been named as one of the most influential thinkers in the field of HR on four occasions by HR Magazine. He has published numerous papers in leading international outlets including Harvard Business, and eleven books and his work is regularly cited in media and other outlets.

Moderator: Dr. Marion Festing, Professor of Human Resource Management and Intercultural Leadership at ESCP Business School, Berlin, Germany.

Daniel Collings IHRM flyer

Professor Alena Ledeneva, 'The invisible dimensions of human resource management: informal networks, institutions, and practices in international contexts'

October 15, 2020

This talk will take you on a journey of discovery, delving into the open secrets, unwritten rules, and hidden practices in human resource management. The paradox, or not, of the invisibility of the practices of informal governance – practices of cooptation, control, and camouflage – is their ubiquity. Expertly practiced by insiders but often hidden from outsiders, informal practices are, as the Global Informality Project shows, deeply rooted all over the world, yet underestimated in policy. Based on the evidence from the five continents and over 75 countries, made possible by a remarkable collaboration of over 250 scholars (in-formality.com), the insights into the workings of informality within organizations and beyond are essential for tackling social and cultural complexity.

Dr. Alena Ledeneva is a Professor of Politics and Society at the University College London School of Slavonic and East European Studies, United Kingdom. She is an internationally renowned expert on informality and governance. Her books Russia's Economy of Favours (1998), How Russia Really Works (2006), and Can Russia Modernize? (2013) have become must-read sources in Russian studies and social sciences. Her latest co-edited volumes include Innovations in Corruption Studies (2017) and The Global Encyclopedia of Informality (2018). She received her Ph.D. in Social and Political Theory from Cambridge University in the UK (1996). She is a founding director of the Global Informality Project and a founder of the UCL Press FRINGE series.

ModeratorDr. Maral Muratbekova, Professor of Human Resource Management at ESCP Business School, Paris, France.

Alena Ledeneva IHRM Flyer

Professor Marion Festing, 'The cultural context in IHRM - Recent developments and experiences from digital teaching innovations'

September 14, 2020

Context is often what characterizes the particularities of IHRM. For a long time, cultural context was equated with national cultural values investigated in prominent intercultural studies conducted by Hofstede or GLOBE. This led to an intense research program and an oversimplification of the topic in teaching. More recent intercultural research addressing cultural value archetypes, norms, schemata, the situated dynamic framework, cultural mosaic or polyculturalism provides a more differentiated view on culture. This webinar will discuss teaching innovations that integrate latest thinking on understanding and teaching about culture and diversity.

One illustrative example is Moving Tomorrow, a serious game developed at ESCP Business School based on insights from experiential learning theory. It includes key concepts relevant to the cultural context in IHRM in a story telling design, where students have to take decisions that impact on how the story pans out. The overall goal of the game is that the learners value diversity, understand the implications for human interactions and IHRM, and act in a more inclusive way. The experiential game has been included in a blended design using roleplays, case studies, group discussions etc. in various countries.

Marion Festing (Ph.D.) is a Professor of Human Resource Management and Intercultural Leadership at ESCP Business School, Berlin, Germany. Her current research activities combine her interests in international HRM and talent management in various institutional and cultural contexts with diversity and inclusion. Marion's publications include articles in journals such as Human Resource Management, Journal of World Business, and Academy of Management Perspectives. Dr. Festing was interviewed by Dr. Maral Muratbekova, Professor of Human Resource Management at ESCP Business School, Paris, France. The session was moderated by Dr. Mila Lazarova, Associate Professor, International Business at SFU Beedie School of Business and Director of the Centre for Global Workforce Strategy.

Marion Festing IHRM Flyer