ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how multinational company's (MNCs) from three different countries the USA, Japan and South Korea have dealt with the challenges in managing human resources in their European operations within the given institutional contexts. The USA has been considered as a major source of contemporary human resource management (HRM) ideas and practices since the field of HRM was developed in the USA in the mid-1980s. Studies of HRM practices in the European subsidiaries of US MNCs have shown evidence of global standardization of subsidiary practices following the practices of US parent firms. The Japanese MNCs' investment boom in Europe occurred in the period from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s. When MNCs come to Europe they show distinctive approaches to subsidiary HRM, largely originated from their home country, and more or less different challenges emerge as shown in the cases of US, Japanese and Korean MNCs.
