Human Resources Management in the Asia Pacific Essay

Human Resources Management in the Asia Pacific - Essay Example The region has, in fact, emerged as the world's largest consumer market" (Budhwar 2004). The enormous investment and business opportunities offered by Asia-Pacific to foreign entities have always been there. But the generally enigmatic character of this combined market initially discouraged many. MNCs, for example, used to find the Japanese market inhospitable, even impenetrable. As for China, the previous attitude of Saudi Arabia towards that country tells the whole story. Until the 1980s, observed the Brooking Institution in Washington, Saudi Arabia was unwilling to sell oil to China because of perceptions that it was a godless, revolutionary threat. Now, foreign investors and MNCs tread into the markets of all the Asia-Pacific countries on a welcome mat, such that the region has outflanked even EU as host to the most number of MNCs. But it would seem that MNCs have to sweat it out first to make their standard management and employment practices work in this region of widely divergent cultures. "The subject matter of our project is that international organizations are faced with the problem of providing people from differing cultural contexts with a working framework that enables successful co-operation. On the basis of original research, our intention is to extend the knowledge of the internal and external relationships of work groups in various cultural contexts. As co-operation processes play a central role in teams we focus on processes centred on co-operation in and between groups with teams understood as social systems which define themselves in relation to their organizational and social surroundings"(Brewster, Harris, 279: 1999). To understand the challenges inherent in this task, it would be helpful to take up a hypothetical case, say, a consultant assigned by an Australian-based MNC to prepare the ground for the company's foray into a joint venture with an Asia-Pacific market. The first thing to consider is that there is no existing HRM literature here, such that the concept may be new or non-existent in some regions. If these materials are available at all, companies in a particular country may be using different HRM systems. Thus, it is imperative that the MNC consultant develops a new HRM framework that factors in the employment systems being observed by the local company it intends to partner with. The management practices employed by both managers and non-management labour must be fused into this framework. For the purpose of our hypothesis, we pick China as target destination of the Australian MNC since this market exhibits many of the peculiarities of the Asia-Pacific economies. Like many countries in the region, China has responded to the clarion call for globalization by switching to a market economy. This called for the dismantling of state apparatus that planned and controlled the economy, which gave rise to such anomalies as high employment rates but low wages, high welfare and low productivity.  Ã‚