An organizational perspective on multi-level cultural integration: human resource management practices in cross-cultural contexts

Aumann and Ostroff proposed a very comprehensive framework that attempts to identify the antecedents, mediators, moderators, and consequences of human resource management (HRM) in cross-cultural contexts. It is an ambitious framework that spans three levels of analysis (society, organization, and individual) with mechanisms of fit occurring at both the macro- and microlevels, focuses on both structure and process, and identifies cross-level interactions. The authors considered organizational and psychological climate as the key integration between culture and employee responses, and in this process inadvertently dismissed the function of organizational culture. We propose an organizational perspective on multi-level cultural integration and discuss its implication for cross-cultural HRM, highlighting the role of organizational culture as the major focus for integration with a host country's societal culture and its local employees’ values. The analysis is enriched by considering the strength of both organizational and societal culture and the cultural distance between the home and host country of the multinational firm. We identify how our approach has both augmented and simplified Aumann and Ostroff's framework to facilitate future research.