Can Short-Term International Assignments Solve an Organization’s Talent Shortages?

Abstract

The use of short-term international assignments (’short-term assignments’) by organizations has only attracted the attention of researchers and management writers in recent years. Defined as lasting between one and twelve months (Tahvanainen et al., 2005), a great deal of research highlights the apparent rapid increase in the use of such assignments. However, there is clear evidence that some global organizations, especially those in knowledge-intensive industries, have built business models based on short-term assignments through the use of global resource pools that can be moved internationally to a client site to undertake short-term and long-term projects. There is also a growing awareness that, while statistics might indicate that the growth of short-term assignments is a recent development, this activity might actually have been flourishing for some years ‘under the radar’ of formal personnel systems and human resource (HR) functions.