What type of employee profile will the company wish to seek when recruiting based on their 'cost-reduction strategy?'
If Pacific Brands is to pursue the competitive strategy of cost-reduction to gain competitive advantage, the company should seek employees displaying the following role behaviours: relatively repetitive and predictable behaviours, a rather short-term focus, primarily autonomous or individual activity, modest concern for quality, high concern for quantity of output (goods or services), primary concern for results, low risk-taking activity, and a relatively high degree of comfort with stability.
HR practices that maximise efficiency by enabling management to monitor and closely control employee activities are required to successfully implement the cost-reduction strategy. HR practices to enable this include; clearly defined and reasonably fixed unambiguous job descriptions, jobs designed with a narrow focus and narrowly defined career paths which encourage efficiency and specialisation, performance appraisals with a short-term results-orientation, monitoring of market pay levels intently to make remuneration decisions, and minimal levels of employee training and development.
How could Pacific Brands strategically implement their 'cost-reduction strategy'?
The globalisation of business is increasingly making it more important to have strategies, policies and processes in place that enable a MNE such as Pacific Brands to operate more efficiently. A significant aspect in the management of a MNE relates to the area of strategic international human resource management (SIHRM) which is defined as HRM issues, functions, and policies and practices that result from the strategic activities of a MNE and that impact the international concerns and goals of those enterprises.
Schuler offer's an integrative framework of SIHRM. The framework consists of;