Fostering organizational resilience in MNCs: The mobilization of the HR managers

Following Boxall, Purcell, and Wright (2007) international human resource management focuses on companies operating across national boundaries. Globalization forces multinational companies (MNCs) to be overexposed to social and economic shifts and jolts. As a consequence, to survive they need to develop capacity for resilience to be able to anticipate, respond, adapt to, and/or rapidly recover from negative events that may occur. Resilience can be analysed at a macro-, meso- and micro-level (organization, organizational units, individual). Similarly, the HR system of a MNC is designed at the macro-headquarter level (HR philosophy, strategy, guidelines), executed at a meso-subsidiary level (HR local policy and practice) and enacted and perceived at a micro-individual level. Symmetrically, international mobility (IM) might be used to activate companies’ local responsiveness, aimed at the final goal of enhancing the ability of companies to perform globally as they try to balance (horizontal) coordination amongst local subsidiaries and (vertical) control. Within this framework we posit that HR mobile professionals can play a crucial role in translating the general international HR (IHR) policy at the local level, enacting the local responsiveness. Being aware of the fact that many other factors can be associated with organizational resilience (i.e. leadership effectiveness, system thinking, environmental monitoring), the paper moves from the mechanical definition of resilience, trying to ‘integrate’ different perspectives borrowed from other fields via proposing a multi-level framework posing on the interplay of IHR management along three different levels of execution: headquarter, subsidiary, individual.