Forms Of International Assignements Applied By Foreign Companies Operating In Albania

Various authors argue that, in today’s highly competitive global business environment, the effective management of international human resources, is imperative for the MNCs ’ ability to appropriately identify and fulfill markets’ demands, to continuously innovate and consequently to differentiate from their competitors. Within the context of international human resources management (IHRM), global staffing, has been receiving particular attention among researchers, for almost three decades, firstly focusing on expatriates’ management and more recently on new forms of international assignments. Nevertheless, discussions on the field of IHRM as well as the issue of global staffing are quite new and rare in the Albanian management literature, despite the growing number of foreign companies investing and operating in Albania. Due to this literature gap, especially regarding the new forms of international transfers, the purpose of this paper is to make the first step in understanding the actual forms of international assignments used by foreign companies in Albania. Accordingly, the paper is built as an exploratory study, based on three main pillars. At first, it aims to present the various forms of international transfers MNC’s use. Second, it tries to explore, through the use of case studies, if any of these forms is applicable by foreign companies in Albania. And third, it aims to set a base for raising questions for future research in this specific topic. The primary research instrument used for the purposes of this paper is the semi-structured interview, conducted with the HRM officials at the headquarters of the companies selected as case studies, or the manager of the HR department of these companies’ subsidiaries in Albania. Given the exploratory nature of the study and the fact that it belongs to a quite new topic in the Albanian literature, several foreign companies operating in our country, belonging to different sectors, such as banking, production, insurance, education and telecommunication, have been subject of interviews with HRM staff. However, only the interview results of two of these case studies are presented in details in the paper.