Research Proposal: Analyzing Global Management Challenges in Business

This research proposal delves into the multifaceted challenges confronting global management teams within multinational enterprises (MNEs). It begins by outlining the project's scope and objectives, which center on identifying and analyzing the hurdles faced in global contexts. The literature review explores various aspects, including challenges in HR management due to economic shifts, diversity, globalization, and technology. It examines issues at the subsidiary level, cross-cultural management complexities, the impact of corporate social responsibility (CSR), legal and technological challenges, talent acquisition difficulties, communication gaps, and outsourcing innovation. The proposal highlights gaps in existing research, particularly in cross-cultural management and outsourcing innovation, and concludes by emphasizing the need for further investigation into these critical areas. The study aims to provide insights for developing new global management strategies to enhance company growth in the global market and improve outsourcing practices.

Running head: RESEARCH PROPOSAL
Business Research Method Research Proposal
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author’s Note

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Contents
Introduction......................................................................................................................................2
Project Scope...................................................................................................................................2
Project Objective.............................................................................................................................2
Literature Review............................................................................................................................3
Challenges in HR management....................................................................................................3
Challenges in subsidiary level......................................................................................................3
Challenges in cross-cultural management....................................................................................4
Challenges in CRS.......................................................................................................................5
Challenges in legal grounds.........................................................................................................6
Challenges related to technology.................................................................................................6
Challenges in the ground of talent hunt.......................................................................................7
Challenges in communication gap...............................................................................................7
Challenges in Outsourcing Innovation.........................................................................................8
Gap in the literature......................................................................................................................8
Conclusion.......................................................................................................................................8

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Introduction
Global management teams of a company are the section that operates in handling the
issues that are faced in the global market. Their duty is to manage the companie resources in the
global level. There are some Organizations like the Multinational Enterprises that are large
global organizations that is incorporated in one country but operate in global level. A MNE can
be identified from some of its major characteristics. These types of companies are large in size
and they operate in global level, but their activities are primarily controlled centrally by their
parent companies. This paper will be focusing on the challenges that are faced by the
management teams in global levels of their management. In other words, the paper will be
discussing about challenges of global management of the companies operating in the global
market. Literature review is highlighted in the paper, prior to which, scope and the objective of
the project is also presented.
Project Scope
The project will be carried forward keeping its central focus on the challenges that are
faced by the management teams of the companies in global context.
Project Objective
 To identify the challenges that is faced by the global management team around the world.
 To preparing new global management strategies eliminating the problems and to ensure
the growth of the company in the globalization market.
 To manage the outsourcing of innovation.

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Literature Review
Challenges in HR management
The human resource management team of different international companies is currently
facing challenges due to the changes in the economy, domestic diversity, globalization and
technology. All these changes have placed new demands in front of the industry and propelled
the field in some entirely new direction. This is a major challenge for the industry as they have to
bring variety of changes in the organization. With greater challenges came new opportunities for
the HR and the organization (Stone and Deadrick 2015).
Challenges in subsidiary level
The complexity in the interaction due to globalization increased the challenges for the
Multinational Enterprises in managing them. The MNEs have to manage two levels of multiple
embeddedness, one at MNE level and another at subsidiary level. In order to exploit similarities
and differences of their host locations effectively, they have to set their network in accordance
with that. On the subsidiary level, they have to balance the internal and the external
embeddedness of the company. Thus it creates both challenges and opportunities for the
company, where the challenge lies in operational part and the opportunity on the other hand is in
business growth (Meyer, Mudambi and Narula 2011).
The alignment of capabilities and the charters are required in order to bring changes in
subsidiary level. A managerial coordination is essential for the purpose which are interaction
based, charter and experience coordination. Implication of these mechanisms can result in
alignment of the charters. It can also introduce us to the new insights into the misalignments

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which can become a useful source for distinguishing the HQ mandates and subsidiary actions.
(Friesl and Silberzahn 2017).
With the growing globalization of the business in today’s market bring complexity in
Multinational Enterprises and highlights the challenges of managing headquarters’ subsidiary
relationships. Hoenen and Kostova highlighted various subsidiary relationship issues in a wide
range of MNEs and concluded that implementation of the agency theory; specifically recent
progression can advance the understanding of the issue and provide guidance for resolving it.
Static multilateral, static bilateral, dynamic and social and contextual streams of agency theory
can is suggested by the authors (Hoenen and Kostova 2015).
Regional management centers are often replaced by the regional headquarters or
management mandates in the field of multinational enterprises. It is to operate the subsidiaries. In
the article, ‘Multinational enterprise regional management centers; Characteristics and
performances’ the authors have identified several differences in the characteristics and the
performance gap between RMMs and RHQs. Longitudinal sample of 855 Japanese RMCs in 41
countries has been used in the article for this. The authors suggested a structural complement to
regional strategy extensions of the integration responsiveness framework and gave an important
large sample baseline. It results new theoretical and empirical research into MNE regional
management strategy and structure (Chakravarty et al. 2017).
Parrot (2013) highlighted the challenges of mainstreaming microfinance and the role of
socially responsible investment. It also integrated illustrations of the micro credits generated by
the pilot and pointed the potential sales that will generate the promotion of housing microfinance
and the number of people will get impacted.

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Challenges in cross-cultural management
Lou in is article ‘Toward a reverse adaptation view in cross-cultural management’ in
2016 identifies the need of maintain the independence of both global and local level
management. He further stated that, these global MNEs often approach their local talent needs in
an unproductive and uncoordinated way. On contrary, the MNEs can also create competitive
advantage by taking a global approach to its talents. This transformation and cultivation of local
into global talent necessitates endeavor from a wide range of corporate, individual and subsidiary
level in cultural, structural, professional, organizational and informal aspects.
As an international organization, the MNEs have to operate in a global level, therefore,
not only deal with people of various geographies, but also from various cultures. This is a major
issue that every MNE’s manager has to face. Moreover, there are various issues are related with
the geographical and cultural phenomena, which are, linguistic, spatial, political, economic and
societal issues which needs to be dealt with a single HR plan. It puts the manager in a tough
situation to prepare a strategy for all these (Allen, Lee and Reiche 2015).
Challenges in CRS
CSR or Corporate Social responsibility is a recent trend which gained importance in 1960
and is closely related to the MNE industry. It is the responsibilities to the society and a large
section of the stakeholders beyond the shareholders of the organization. In order to manage the
social obligations, different MNEs have established dedicated organizational units to explore the
variety of options for their corporate engagements. MNEs have to have broad management
strategy in order to handle the CSR issues. The sole reason for this is that the MNEs have to
work in a global market in a broad geographical territory. Hence, they have to deal with more

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than just one society. Various social obligations need to be considered while forming the CSR
policy of the company (Wang et al. 2016).
Lopez and Fornes (2015) in their paper ‘Corporate social responsibility in emerging
markets: case studies of Spanish MNCs in Latin America’ discussed about the CSR policies of
MNCs in emerging markets from developed countries. They supported their thought with eight
case studies which they collected through in-depth interview of the senior managers. Their
findings indicated that the MNCs under study faced similar kinds of challenges in forming CSR
policies for their respective companies. Diversity of culture and ethnicity of the operating
countries possessed threat for the company to form a proper CSR policy which can be resolved
with the help of instrumental theory. The theory is guided by the strategic tool to achieve
economic objective, positive relation between the financial performance and them and use these
to strengthen their reputation (Lopez and Fornes 2015).
Challenges in legal grounds
According to Gashu (2016), the companies should operate by the rules of the home
country as well as the host country and the international laws. Which means, that the company
should make a versatile policy for the legal environment to handle all the societies under
operation. They should also consider prepare separate flexible and adaptable law and other legal
rule for each society. The knowledge of the operational countries is essential for the management
of the company to make these rules which can be a challenge. These laws and regulations can
also increase the risk factors for the country as the investors will withdraw their branches from
the respective countries if the laws do not fit profitable for the company. It impacts the company
in an identical manner as they may lose a strong market for their company.

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Challenges related to technology
MNE also faces challenges in the technological grounds which is an important source of
economic advantage for both the company and the host country. For that, the company needs to
have superior technological capabilities in comparison to the domestic companies of the host
country as it leaves an opportunity for the company to grow. It will also result in increase in
productivity (Narula and Driffield 20125).
Challenges in the ground of talent hunt
Another essential factor that plays a vital role in the success is the talent and here lies the
challenge. MNCs often come across competition for talent worldwide by increasing their efforts
in global talent management. MNCs often incorporate information and communication
technology to increase the efficiency of the strategic alignment of Global talent management.
Companies face hurdle in this part, where they have to properly align these two for the success of
the company (Ruël and Lake 2014).
Challenges in communication gap
Klitmøller, Schneider and Jonsen (2015) in their paper worked on relation between media
choice, language difference and social categorization in the global virtual terms where they came
across with various hurdles a MNC faces. They found that there is a significant gap between
verbal media and language proficiency difference which lead to social categorization in the
employees and also in dealing with the client. Surprisingly, they received a different feedback in
case of the written media. It became a challenge for the MNCs in managing its employees in the
organization. Eventually it decreases the efficiency of the team as the team members find
distance between themselves because of the language issue. Similar problem arises when a team
is relocated in a different part where there is a difference in language. For example, if a

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American team is relocated in their office in France, it drastically reduces the efficiency of both
the team and the office where they are posted due to the language barrier. This obstacle lies
within every global company and no solution have been proposed for resolving it.
Challenges in Outsourcing Innovation
Outsourcing the innovation is another vital challenge that a MNC faces. It is hard for a
MNC to come up with an innovative strategic idea in this era of globalization. The companies
need to bring adjustments in outsourcing the research and development. The problem arises in
decision making at the time, when there is a characteristic gap between the home country and the
host country. Heterogeneity between the host and the home country impacts on the autonomy of
the innovation at the host country which results in higher transaction cost. As the transaction cost
in the primary determinant of making decision, it leaves direct impact on the outsourcing of the
innovation (Yeo et al. 2017).
Gap in the literature
The above studies discussed about the challenges that are faced by a company’s global
management team. Various articles gave insight on issues in various grounds. But there are still a
lot of scopes to conduct research. There is clear need of further research in cross-cultural
management. Though there are some articles available in the ground, further research is always
welcomed in the field. The existing studies discuss very few on about the outsourcing of the
innovations of the global companies which can be the primary focus of the company.
Conclusion
From the above the discussion, it can be concluded that there are various challenges that
are face by the MNE management in the changing market. The changes in the management of

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the industry are essential to cope up with the changes in the global market. The challenges that
are currently faced in outsourcing of innovation are a field where much opportunity is available
to carry out the research as there are only few works has been conducted. On the other hand, the
communication gap due to cultural differences is a forever issue of the MNC industry. It can
never be completely eradicated as the ethnic and linguistic gap can never be minimized as the
industry operates in global level. Though numerous studies have been conducted on the issue,
but there is much scope to work in it as it requires more advancement to manage the issue.
Multiple embeddedness, subsidiary management issue, culture issues, CSR management
challenges, technological problem and some other issues have been highlighted in the proposal.

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References
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