International mobility and international careers. A multi-level framework for organizational resilience

Globalization forces multinational companies (MNCs) to be overexposed to social and economic shifts and jolts ingrained in the environments they deal with. As a consequence they are asked to develop a capacity for resilience (Mallak, 1997, 1998; Vogus and Sutcliffe, 2007) as they need to be able to anticipate, respond, adapt to, and/or rapidly recover from negative events or crisis that may occur. This paper tries to respond to the general call for a higher level of investigation in the field of careers’ studies (e.g. Arthur, 2008; Jones & Dunn, 2007) by proposing an interdisciplinary attempt (e.g. Khapova & Arthur, 2011; Lawrence, 2011) to read the international mobility policies of MNCs as a mean for developing organizational resilience. In fact, the HR system of a MNC (International Human Resource Management – IHRM) is a suitable context (e.g. Mayrhofer, Meyer & Steyer, 2007) for multi-level analysis, since it is designed at the macro-headquarter level (HR philosophy, strategy, guidelines), executed at a meso-subsidiary level (HR local policy and practice), and enacted at a micro-individual level. Within this framework we posit that HR expatriates play a crucial role in translating the general HR policy for resilience at local level by enacting the local responsiveness (Bartlett & Ghoshal, 1992). Considering the multi-level nature of both careers and resilience, and the suitability of the MNCs’ HR system for multi-level analysis, this paper tries to fill the gap of a joint theoretical language allowing communication between various discourses and perspectives (De Cieri, Cox, Fenwick, 2007; Gunz & Mayrhofer, 2011). Accordingly, it proposes a new conceptual framework for organizational resilience that passes through the role of IHRM and the design of career paths.