Human resource management systems and knowledge management: the key to develop interorganisational teams

Abstract

Those multinational companies that choose a transnational strategy must achieve three objectives simultaneously: global efficiency, local sensibility and organisational learning. The last objective represents an organisational process that involves three different levels of learning: individual, group and organisational level. On the other hand, the process of organisational learning can find several obstacles that hinder or prevent achieving its objectives. In this sense, many firms have an autistic culture where knowledge hoarding is a key feature, which means a hindrance for the transfer of this knowledge to other organisational members as well as for its reuse and amplification. Thus firms must build an organisational culture that emphasises knowledge sharing in order to benefit from the strategic value of this resource. In achieving this goal, human resource management policies will play a key role. With this premises, this paper aims to analyse, from a knowledge management view, how multinational corporations face the triple objective of achieving global efficiency, local sensibility and organisational learning, using human resource policies.