Swimming against the tide: Outward staffing flows from multinational subsidiaries

David G. Collings, Anthony McDonnell, Patrick Gunnigle, Jonathan Lavelle

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

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.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)575-598
Number of pages24
JournalHuman Resource Management
Volume49
Issue number4
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Jul 2010
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Expatriates
  • Global staffing
  • Inpatriates
  • Institutional theory
  • International assignments
  • Resource-based view
  • Third country nationals

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