Ari worked as a senior HR Manager in a global bank on a two-year secondment in the Middle East and North Africa region. At the end of this assignment, Ari recounted several critical episodes:

In the HR team we faced some quite tricky situations. One day, a male staff member who is a local citizen stormed into my office. He said that his wife, another employee, had left the country with an expatriate who had been working in our bank as a consultant. The husband demanded that I call the police to arrest the consultant (who no longer worked for us). All I could say was that while I was concerned about the welfare of the man's wife as our employee, I could not interfere in domestic matters.

On another occasion, an employee marched into my office wielding confidential data from another global bank, one of our competitors. We were making this employee's job redundant because our retail branches were closing. I called the competitor bank in front of him to ask them where they would like me to deliver the stolen information. I assured them that I would not look at it. Curiously, the employee thought I was going to reward him for this unethical behaviour and save his job!

Another very difficult issue for us was that the bank's licence to operate in this particular country depended on us employing 75 per cent local citizens. When we ran the retail side of the business, this was possible but when we only operated the investment arm, then we needed higher qualified staff. The problem is that local banking specialists prefer to work for national or Islamic banks because of shorter working hours and better job security and not for a European bank/MNC.

Finally, two catastrophic events really tested my professionalism. The first was a fire in our document repository which destroyed personnel files and other important records just before we had a merger. The second incident was the alleged rape of one of our female staff. During a very hot summer, a leading client said he was too busy and tired to travel to the bank to sign some papers. He requested that a member of the bank's staff visit his home to explain the contracts. Unfortunately, a woman employee agreed to this request and we had to deal with accusations that she was molested during the visit.

Overall it's been very interesting working on this overseas assignment as we've restructured our operations and hired more local talent. It's also been highly stressful. I'm ready to return to \(\mathrm{HQ}\) for a while and take stock of my next career move!

Questions

1 Why do you think the HR matters Ari dealt with were more complex in an MNC context than in a purely domestic organisation?

2 Provide examples in the diagram below of HR functions in this bank that might be adopted from different sources and applied to different types of staff, for example planning, policy development, payroll, benefits, resourcing, induction, learning and development, performance management, talent management, reward, employee relations, employee exit, HR systems, employee survey, relocations:

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(i) Localised HR practices (ii) Standardised 'global best practices' (iii) Policies transferred from HQ Figure 3.1 HR practices in context