Culture and talent management in Chinese context : a case study of Huawei Technologies Co Ltd.

Abstract

The Talent Management (TM) research is relatively young in the field of international business and has gradually attracted lots of attention from academics and practitioners. However, there are some significant gaps left for further empirical development. For example, most of the TM studies focus on the analyzing the western multinationals’ TM system in the emerging regions, and their results only reflected the view of HR managers. In addition, currently there is only a few numbers of studies used qualitative methods. Therefore, the thesis aims to respond to scholars’ call for qualitative research on TM to investigate the effective TM practices in Chinese context from the perspectives of senior business managers. The thesis focuses on a thorough case study of Huawei’s TM system which is one of the best in eyes of most Chinese to deduce how Chinese multinationals attract, develop and retain their talented employees. Both primary interview and secondary resources are used in the data collection. The analysis is divided into two aspects and mainly focuses on the first aspect which is the influence of Chinese cultural values (Confucianism, Face: Mian-zi, Relationship: Guan-xi) on the TM strategies. The other is the influence of non-cultural factor but applicable in the Chinese context. The findings shed light on the effective strategies of TM based on the Chinese contexts and provide the recommendations to other Chinese and foreign multinationals which have offices in China.