Case 1: Samsung Electronics

1. As for the success of Samsung today, do you think it is related to its international human resource management strategies? If the answer is yes, please explain how and why? Samsung has seen tremendous success in recent history, and 2012 has been nothing short of stellar for the consumer electronics vendor so far. So what made these successes for Samsung? In my opinion, there are some factors that bring the success to Samsung, which are: leadership, product, technology and international human resource management strategies. ➢ The Samsung’s chairman: Kun Hee Lee is ambitious, risky man and he has a very good vision to future so that he decided to invest in newly high tech in Korea which called Semiconductor by just his own personal savings. Thus, he led Samsung to be pioneer in this field. ➢ In Samsung, reliability and product quality are always considered to bring perfect products to its customers. Moreover, “Customized architectures for niche market” was also used for producing. ➢ Besides, the international human resource management is still concerned with the following strategies below: - Expatriate strategy in which it highly appreciated the foreign employees is used. - Focusing on Global strategy group by encouraging talent from around the world. - Investing a lot of money on training its own expertise to be global by sending the potential one to foreign countries to learn local language and culture. - Using Reward power to encourage employees work hard and no punish failure so that people can feel free to create and give out idea. 2. What incentives that Samsung has been employed to motivate employees’ performance? What incentive may count the most in motivating employee’s performance? Samsung used Incentives as the reward for successful employees, which are 3types of Performance-based incentives:
- Project Incentives: to reward project members.
- Productivity Incentives: to reward employees for performance at the division level.
- Profit Incentives: to reward each member of a division. In my opinion, the Productivity Incentives may count the most in motivating people, cause that this kind of incentive is modified for each department/ team on its performance and distribution, which is the same to Profit Incentives. However, compared with Profit Incentives, it is much higher 6 times. Thus, employees are more motivated to work hard and gain success.
3. What recommendation would you make to Chairman Lee regarding Samsung’s response to the threat of large-scale Chinese entry? Some recommendations to Samsung to response new competition: Chinese entry: - Focusing on new products at centralized sites (niche markets). By keeping centralized products, Samsung could take the competitive advantage in changing environment. - Focusing on development of memory used nanotechnology. In the future, this kind of technology could be substitute for DRAM, flash memory which now Samsung provides. - Partnering with Chinese firms to take some advantages such as: differentiated products, keep costs down by subsidy chances from partners. - Becoming major stakeholder in collaborating with each Chinese firm to maintain its owned control.