National culture insights on manufacturing competitiveness and talent management relationship

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore how the critical relationship between talent management (TM) and manufacturing competitiveness (MC) can be better understood through national culture. The authors specifically focus on the moderation effect of the long-term orientation (LTO) culture dimension over this relationship.Design/methodology/approachThe exploration of the moderation effect is carried out by comparing the impact of LTO on the hypothesized linear relationship between the Manufacturing Competitiveness Index (MCI) and different aspects of the Global Talent Management Competitiveness Index (GTCI). The authors compare whether LTO had any improvement in the ability of the different TM pillars to better explain some of the variation of MCI scores among the considered countries.FindingsThe authors found enough support for most of the proposed hypotheses, with results showing a positive relationship between MCI and GTCI. The authors conclude that differences in this relationship can be better explained using the national culture dimension of LTO. The managerial impact of such findings suggests that manufacturing strategists need to consider deeper knowledge of the regional national culture when assessing investments locations.Research limitations/implicationsThis research provides a conceptual foundation for the relationship among LTO, TM and MC, but has some limitations due to its exploratory nature. These limitations are related to using secondary data that can be updated in the future, excluding other national culture dimensions that can also relate to the previous variables, and also not considering some relevant political and economic parameters.Practical implicationsThe findings of this paper will help to understand the positive relationship among TM, MC and the LTO dimension of national culture; better explain variations that exist in the impact of different TM practices on MC; and give managers some knowledge for global manufacturing excellence decisions within national cultural context.Originality/valueTo the authors’ knowledge, no previous work captured the relation between MC and TM from a national culture perspective. With more manufacturing economies evolving toward being more knowledge based, research focusing on how talents and skills required for such evolution are related to national cultures is becoming more critical.