International transfer of employee-oriented CSR practices by multinational SME’s

Will multinational SMEs use internationalisation to achieve labour cost savings at the expense of employees both in their home country and abroad or will they transfer their existing employee-oriented practices to their foreign subsidiaries? This paper argues that the answer to this question is affected by: (1) the salience of employees at home as well as abroad to management; (2) the type of employee-relations arrangements in use within the company; (3) the capability to develop and use high-performance human resource instruments for employee-oriented CSR practices; (4) the capability to adapt the type and design of high-performance human resource instruments to the local institutional environment; (5) the extent to which the multinational SME possesses institutional capital. Multinational SMEs with slack resources, a high degree of institutional capital, and to which employees are highly salient, are most likely to transfer employee-oriented CSR practices abroad and to do so successfully.