The configuration of employee retention practices in multinational corporations’ foreign subsidiaries

This paper contributes to turnover research by deriving a typology of retention practices and investigating their applicability in multinational corporations’ (MNCs) foreign subsidiaries in the light of home- and host-country effects. Linking institutional and strategic HRM perspectives, the paper then proposes a conceptual framework examining how MNCs can maximize their retention capacity. Specifically, MNCs need to align their transferable home-country retention practices with overall strategy and complement them with flexible context-specific practices to allow for adaptability across different subsidiaries. It is further argued that characteristics of the headquarters–subsidiary relationship will influence the relative importance of context-generalizable versus context-specific retention practices and that the relevant set of practices for each subsidiary then needs to be configured individually.