Swimming against the tide: Outward staffing flows from multinational subsidiaries
基于对爱尔兰外资跨国公司的实证研究，分析了子公司向总部和其他海外机构派遣员工的模式，发现近半数跨国公司存在这种向外流动，并受总部、子公司结构及人力资源系统等因素影响。
Abstract Studying the flows of parent country nationals in multinational enterprises (MNEs) to subsidiary operations has a relatively long tradition. Studying flows of subsidiary employees to other subsidiaries, as third country nationals, and to the corporate headquarters, as inpatriates, however, has empirically much less pedigree. Drawing on a large‐scale empirical study of MNEs in Ireland, this paper provides a benchmark of outward flows of international assignees from the Irish subsidiaries of foreign‐owned MNEs to both corporate headquarters and other worldwide operations. Building on insights from the resource‐based view and neo‐institutional theory, we develop and test a theoretical model to explain outward staffing flows. The results show that almost half of all MNEs use some form of outward staffing flows from their Irish operations. Although the impact of specific variables in explaining inter‐organization variation differs between the utilization of inpatriate and third country national assignments, overall we find that a number of headquarters, subsidiary, structural, and human resource systems factors emerge as strong predictors of outward staffing flows. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.