On Monday morning at 7.30 a.m., Dr Hans was leaving his apartment, one specifically rented to expatriates, and was heading towards his office in Kuala Lumpur's central business district. On the way, he listened to the voice messages on his mobile phone, one of which was from the assistant of the firm's owner, Frank. The message stated that Hans was expected to call back before his meeting with the human resources (HR) team that he was leading. The team meeting was scheduled in order to bring together Hans and Chinese HR experts to form a cross-functional project team responsible for the development and implementation of a new personnel process within the context of global restructuring, in order to fill 25 middle management positions in the Australasia region.

According to the in-house global localisation policy of the company, MobilCom, 90 per cent of the new management positions were to be filled by individuals originating from the country they would be working in. The affected areas included sales and marketing, purchasing, supply chain management, and finance and accounting, at locations in Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, Jakarta, Singapore, Sydney, Oakland and Port Moresby (Papua New Guinea). The new personnel selection system was part of the company's new objective to standardise all HR instruments for selection purposes around the globe. This new personnel selection system had to be developed internally.

When Hans first heard about the above changes, it immediately occurred to him that this would not be easy as personnel selection procedures varied significantly between countries. He also knew that the existing selection instruments were by no means flawless in any specific country. After the application documents had been analysed, structured interviews with the candidates were conducted by a department representative and an HR specialist. If both interviewers came to a positive conclusion on the candidate's qualifications, the top candidates were sent to an individual assessment centre in order to highlight their interpersonal competencies rather than their professional competencies. The approach of the individual assessment centres consisted of biographical questions, case studies on leadership in an international context, and participation in a leaderless group discussion. Ultimately, additional references were obtained for each candidate, although different procedures existed in different countries. After the reference checks had been completed, each candidate received written feedback, and a report was generated and added to the successful candidate's personnel file.

For several years now, Hans had been finding faults in the design of the procedures used at the individual assessment centres, but he could not influence possible modifications because the individual assessment centres were run by external consulting firms. In addition, he had been questioning the validity of the information obtained from the centres, as well as the selection system as a whole. He felt there was a need to improve the contents of the structured interviews that were based on the candidate's current situation, as opposed to the candidate's previous work experience. Overall, efforts to improve the current selection systems had only rarely been undertaken owing to limited time and a limited budget allotted for personnel affairs - a fact that Hans had already pointed out to management several times.

The development of a new multinational personnel selection system now posed a huge challenge for Hans and his project team. His team, comprising Australian and Chinese members with HR knowledge as well as HR managers from headquarters, had already been working on the development of the new personnel selection system for four months. Over the past few weeks, numerous meetings had been held, yet no significant progress had been made. One reason could be the fact that there was obvious heterogeneity between the opinions of the Aus. tralian and Asian team members regarding the new personnel selection system. This created a tense atmosphere and dissent with respect to sharing the workload. The goal of today's meeting was to come to a consensus on several important issues:

- what individual modules the new personnel selection system should contain;

- whether country-specific adaptations were necessary and feasible for each module;

- the implementation process of the new personnel instrument at each location.

When Hans arrived at his office, one of the three Chinese secretaries reminded him that Frank was waiting for him to return his call. She avoided eye contact by looking down to the floor, but with a big smile and gestures that appeared submissive as she perpetually nodded her head. Hans rang Frank, and Frank began speaking:

Dr Hans, you know how much I appreciate your dedication to the company, but I have concerns about the current international selection procedures. We need something that is going to work, and work immediately! And don't you dare try to offer me this empirical or validity stuff. I don't give a damn. You have a whole department with highly qualified people. I assume you are capable of filling these vacant management positions. We also need a selection system that works everywhere. We cannot afford to apply different procedures in every country. What we need are consistent procedures, something applicable cross-nationally and crossregionally. You, as a cosmopolitan man, should know exactly what I mean. I also expect everything to be documented in complete detail.

Although Hans shared Frank's enthusiasm for an improved personnel selection system, there were many complications that could arise; Frank seemed completely unaware of these, and Hans tried to inform him about the possible problems. Hans argued that although a multinational selection system would have its advantages, thes \(\epsilon\) advantages might become costly if they could not easily be implemented in each region. Each country has its own unique economic and education situations, which would undoubtedly cause difficulties when creating a universal personnel selection system. With respect to cultural difference, he argued that a standardised personnel selection system would also ignore cultural differences and culture-specific circumstances. This would affect not only individual modules in the system but also the basic job requirements, the adaptation of modules to specific countries, and the use of specific selection methods. Hans also expressed his concern with Frank's lack of interest in testing the validity of the new selection procedures.

Of course, that wasn't exactly what Frank wanted to hear:

Don't tell me about problems; I want solutions. And you should not forget that this is what I pay you and your team to do. You have until the end of this week to deliver the final and written conclusions on this matter. If not, I will reduce your team in Kuala Lumpur by half, and I will delegate the development of this new system to global headquarters. Either you come up with something useful by the end of this week, or central headquarters will do the job. End of discussion.

The team meeting

At the meeting, Hans informed everyone about the current situation with Frank, set the objectives of the meeting, and asked for the detailed recording of everything they discussed. The Chinese colleagues agreed by nodding their heads uniformly, a behaviour that was always expected when there was an order from a member with higher hierarchical status, whereas the Australian colleagues openly disapproved of the detailed recording of the discussions.
During the meeting, there was an apparent disagreement between a Chinese HR employee and the Australian economist regarding the definitions of the job requirements and their profiles. Yu wanted to include 15 dimensions - 5 components that tested the candidate's professional competencies and 10 dimensions that evaluated social competencies. However, Andreas openly disagreed with this proposition: 'I have told you many times that the acquisition of 15 dimensions is simply impossible. It is important to define clearly distinguishable job requirements that are measurable, describable, and equally relevant in all countries in the region'.
Yu, intimidated by her Australian colleague's manner, blushed and looked down towards the floor, signalling that she did not dare to say anything further. She often found it difficult to cope with negative feedback, particularly when it occurred in front of her colleagues. There had been several times already when she had not been able to stand up to Andreas, which seemed to affect her more and more each time. She had once spoken to Hans about her difficulties communicating with Andreas; however, Hans quickly grew irritated by the complaint and asked her to wait and hope for an improvement in the situation. Yu never discussed the situation with Hans again.
The German in-house psychologist intervened in the discussion and proposed the inclusion of six competencies technical and vocational skills, social competencies, leadership competencies, communicative competencies, flexibility, and adaptability - that showed great validity and reliability. There was disagreement from some Chinese members, who proposed the inclusion of several more and different competencies, which ended with them feeling iritated and intimidated. Andreas proposed that, due to the time pressure, they should bring a majority vote with respect to the skills, but the Chinese HR member argued: 'No, a majority vote is not the solution. It may lead to good decisions not succeeding because certain team members follow the uniform opinion of the majority. We should try to reach a consensus on this issue.' The dispute was solved by Hans, who decided which would be the final job requirements for selecting the managers and adopted the six dimensions proposed by the German team members.
The next important issue on the agenda was to define the modules and the job requirements for each module. For this issue, there was agreement that a multinational selection system should be two-tiered. The first tier would consist of three modules: viewing the candidates' application documents, a telephone conference with the applicants that should be conducted in an unstructured manner, and obtaining three references from former employers. Unlike the current procedures, references should not only be used to verify the past employment and duration of employment but also include a statement regarding the candidate's personality. Four modules would follow in the second tier - a panel interview, a biography-oriented in-depth interview, a simulated group exercise and testing procedures. All the modules were described in great detail, and emphasis was placed on including standardised tests in order to increase the validity of the entire process, even though there is evidence that intelligence and personality tests are not generally highly accepted and that cultural problems exist.
Towards the end of the long and detailed presentation of the modules, Hans's colleague Anne, who held a MBA degree from one of the major Australian business schools, interrupted: 'I don't want to be rude, but isn't it important to take the candidate's perspective into consideration, as well?' But Andreas countered: 'Unfortunately, nobody cares about the candidate's perspective. We are interested in choosing the right person, certainly not in satisfying the applicants - these never-ending discussions on fairness and acceptance. Reality differs significantly from the ideal procedures we are taught in university.'
Now, Angela jumped into the discussion:
But let's not forget that management is not just a technical matter, and sometimes, if you find someone generally useful, then you could adapt the job to fit the person. The selection process is always a sort of negotiation between the potential employee and the potential employer. We, as recruiters, cannot really know what any of these people are really going to be like if you take them on. Therefore, we need to deploy the basic human skills of eliciting helpful responses from people and judging the likelihood of one person being a better bet for the organisation than another. In this sense, there is no 'right person', there is only 'the better bet'. Some of the most important determinants of how well someone does the job are ones that arise after the appointment of the individual.
Hans could not stand any further disputes at the time and took the initiative to terminate the long meeting, which had at least achieved the first step towards specifying the modules in terms of content and procedures.

However, they had not been able to specify the adaptations for each target country and the ways of implementing those modules. Hans thought that he should make the decisions himself and then include them in the report to be handed to Frank.
Right after the meeting, Hans went straight to his office and did not come out again for the rest of the afternoon. As soon as he had received the minutes of the meeting, he wrote his final report for Frank. He later received a short notice sent by Frank, informing him that important basic conditions and necessary adaptations had not sufficiently been taken into consideration in the new multinational personnel selection system; therefore, he had handed the case over to global headquarters. Finally, he stated that there would be staff-related consequences for Hans's department in Kuala Lumpur.
Questions
1 Describe in detail all the modules included in the two-tiered selection system proposed by the team.
2 What is the critical analysis of the case study?