Managing global performance management in turbulent times: a sustainable HRM approach

The Sustainable HRM approach to management provides a means of making decisions which impact economic, social/human and ecological outcomes of an organisation. At the heart of Sustainable HRM is the need to reproduce or generate competencies, capabilities and human capital necessary for the organisation to survive and thrive. In times of global economic turbulence, multinational corporations (MNCs) and managers in these organisations face particular difficulties. When the Sustainable HRM approach is modified to take into account real options theory, insights emerge about the types of decisions that can assist MNCs. In particular, insights about the role and nature of performance management processes for global managers can be developed.
This paper examines the way in which the performance management system (PMS) can be used to produce Sustainable HRM outcomes during times of economic turbulence. It focuses on global managers in MNCs. The first part of the paper examines the relationship between the Sustainable HRM framework and its value as a model for the analysis of the management of managers in MNCs during periods of global economic turbulence. The second part of the paper explores the PMS for global managers, paying particular attention to this process in times of economic turbulence. The third part of the paper proposes a framework which extends Sustainable HRM using real options theory as a framework to describe effective performance management of global managers in times of economic turbulence.