An international look at selection practices: Nation and culture as explanations for variability in practice

Headnote

A survey of 959 organizations in 20 countries was undertaken to assess whether differences in staffing practices are due in part to nation and culture. Cultural differences in uncertainty avoidance and, to a lesser extent, power distance, explained some of the national differences observed in the extensiveness of method use. Implications for understanding the best approaches to selection on a global basis are discussed.

With the globalization of organizations, multinational firms have had to consider how to implement human resource (HR) practices on a worldwide scale (Davis, 1995; Erez, 1994; House, 1995; Triandis, 1994). This challenge is made more difficult by a lack of information on the extent to which various practices are universal versus culture specific. One area where HR professionals are particularly challenged is in employee selection, where certain methods that are acceptable in some countries may not be used at all in others. Although there have been a few comparisons of national differences in approaches to selection (see Levy-- Leboyer, 1994, for a review), these have been limited in scope to only a few countries, typically from the same region, have not involved a large sample size, and have provided little in the way of a theoretical framework for explaining differences when they are found. The purpose of this study was to assess whether national differences in selection practices might be explained via an established framework of cultural differences. First, we briefly review the extant literature on national differences in staffing strategies. Second, we use Hofstede's (1980; 1991) framework of cultural differences to hypothesize some likely differences in selection practices according to culture. We then present a study that evaluates whether variability in selection practices exists across nations and whether this variability is explained by cultural differences.

Literature on National Differences in Approaches to Employee Selection

Levy-Leboyer (1994) noted that within Europe there is considerable diversity in approaches to selection, due to the difficulty of obtaining translated versions of the latest research, the former influence of the Communist Party in selection decisions in Eastern Europe, and workers' rights laws limiting selection test use in countries such as Italy. She reviewed 13 surveys of selection method use in Europe (e.g., Robertson & Makin, 1986; Shackleton & Newell, 1991) and concluded (a) interviews...