AstraZeneca is one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies. Headquartered in London, the company has 65,000 employees, 51 percent of whom are in Europe, 32 percent in the Americas, and 17 percent in Asia, Africa, and Australia. The company is active in more than 100 nations and has sales in excess of $30 billion. A key strategic imperative for this multinational is to build a talented global workforce, led by managers who have a global perspective, are comfortable moving around the data available and include details for each country concerning the sectors most impacted. Exercise 2 You work in the human resources department at the headquarters of a multinational corporation. Your company is about to send managers overseas as expatriates (or expats) to France, Russia, Singapore, and Thailand.

To evaluate the possible issues each expat may encounter, you have been advised to use the Expat Explorer survey conducted by HBSC and found at the company's Expat Zone. Prepare a report indicating the potential issues your department may encounter during each expat's stay in these countries. world, interacting with people from other cultures, and doing business in different nations. It is not easy. To help build international bench strength, the company moves managers to another country for up to three years. Such assignments are not cheap; the company estimates that it can cost two to four times an employee's annual salary to cover expenses. Expenses can include a child's school tuition, tax equalization, cultural training, and subsidized housing.

Because of this expense, AstraZeneca focuses its international assignments only on its most promising "high potential" employees, those who are scheduled for advancement and leadership positions within the company. In every case, the human resource staff will assess whether the investment in a person is worth making. Simply posting an employee to a foreign country is not enough. To get promoted, employees must also learn to work in international teams and to manage across borders. If a person is judged to lack the capability to do this, he or she will not get a foreign posting.

If the employee fails to do this effectively when on the posting, advancement prospects will be reduced. To ease the transition to another country, AstraZeneca offers employees and their spouses help with moving, locating schools for children, learning a language, and understanding cultural differences. The company also offers repatriation training for employees coming home after extended postings abroad. It does this because experience has shown that many expatriates and their families have problems readjusting to their old life after extended time in a different culture. trying to raise the skill level of key Chinese employees as fast as possible.

With regard to key managerial talent, the company has been sending them abroad to get exposure to other cultures and to acculturate them into the way in which AstraZeneca does business. It wants them to understand what it is like to be part of a global business. Each expatriate will have a host-country line manager assigned to him or her, as well as a home-country line manager who monitors the expatriate's progress. After a period, the majority of them return to China where the most successful are targeted for future leadership positions within the Chinese subsidiary. The most talented, however, may go beyond this, and ultimately move into senior management positions at the corporate level.7°

Case Discussion Questions

1. What international staffing policy is AstraZeneca pursuing with regard to its "high potential" employees?

2. Why does AstraZeneca limit this policy to just high potential employees? Can you see a drawback in doing this?

3. What staffing policy is AstraZeneca adopting with regard to its subsidiaries in places such as China? Is this an appropriate policy?

Another problem that the human resource function at AstraZeneca has to grapple with is how to raise the talent base of employees in emerging markets where AstraZeneca has been making big investments in recent years. An example is China, where until recently, there was very little in the way of professional management education (this is now changing rapidly). In 2003 the company had a little more than 1,000 employees in China. Now it has over 3,500. AstraZeneca has been trying to raise the skill level of key Chinese employees as fast as possible.

With regard to key managerial talent, the company has been sending them abroad to get exposure to other cultures and to acculturate them into the way in which AstraZeneca does business. It wants them to understand what it is like to be part of a global business. Each expatriate will have a host-country line manager assigned to him or her, as well as a home-country line manager who monitors the expatriate's progress. After a period, the majority of them return to China where the most successful are targeted for future leadership positions within the Chinese subsidiary. T he most talented, however, may go beyond this, and ultimately move into senior management positions at the corporate level

Case Discussion Questions

1. What international staffing policy is AstraZeneca pursuing with regard to its "high potential" employees?

2. Why does AstraZeneca limit this policy to just high potential employees? Can you see a drawback in doing this?

3. What staffing policy is AstraZeneca adopting with regard to its subsidiaries in places such as China? Is this an appropriate policy?

4. Do you think the company is doing enough to limit the well-known risks and costs associated with high expatriate failure rates? Is there anything else it might do?