Article critique on managing globally competent people

Marketing

Managing Globally Competent People

The article Managing Globally Competent People is a good article about what goes into managing people around the world. The author's main point of this article is that transnational firms require transnational human resource management systems in order to be successful. The purpose of this article is to show that global human resource changes need to occur at two levels: individual and systemic. The authors intended audience of this article is human resource managers who work in transnational companies and need to manage a workforce across the globe.

The authors show why global human resource changes need to occur at two levels. They first present a set of skills that is needed by individual managers in order to be globally capable, stressing those which go beyond the previous notable competencies required of expatriate managers. Secondly, they suggest a framework for assessing the global competence of firms' human resource systems. The author's research is based on a survey of fifty major North American firms in which they found today's human resource strategies to be considerably less global than firms' business strategies. In order to overcome this gap they identify a series of illusions preventing firms from creating human resource systems which are sufficiently global to support transnational business strategies.

The author's made an underlying assumption that the knowledge that they are presenting is not widely known and just not being followed. This argument is logical because the idea of globalization is relatively a new one, so the idea that not everyone would know this information is very logical. Doing business in the global arena is very different from the way that things have always been done and having guidelines and best practices set down will be very helpful to those who are venturing into this arena.

The text of this article is well-organized, clear and easy to read. The authors do a very good job of defining important terms so that the meaning is easily understood. The evidence presented in the article appears to be sufficient to support the argument that transnational competent managers necessitate a broader assortment of skills than traditional international managers. It also supports the idea that the development of transnational competent managers depends on firms' organizational capability to design and administer transnational human resource systems. The authors present a very detailed account of what a transnational human resource system is and how human resource managers can achieve one.