ABSTRACT
This chapter explains three language-oriented Human Resource Management (HRM) practices – language-sensitive recruitment, language-sensitive promotion, and language training – in multinational companies and their subsidiaries. Language-oriented HRM practices, in turn, are the concrete means through which language policies are implemented and enacted in MNCs and their subsidiaries. Language policies and language-oriented HRM practices are identified to provide various important benefits in MNCs, such as improved coordination, control, monitoring, communication, knowledge transfer, mutual understanding, learning, reporting, and collective identity. Further, historical and political relations among host and home countries are shown to increase resistance and create emotional barriers to language-oriented HRM practices. Since uniform implementation of language-oriented HRM practices in MNC subsidiaries can lead to suboptimal results, contextual adaptations are needed. For example, MNC subsidiaries in countries with a low average proficiency in the corporate language could selectively recruit a few key host country national with sufficient corporate language proficiency and allocate resources for language training.
