Ian Wat­son & Peter Pre­vos, 26 June 2009.

“A day of trav­el­ling will bring a
bas­ket full of learn­ing”
Viet­namese pro­verb
(Nguyen et al., 1991)

Abstract

Pur­pose

The primary pur­pose of this report is to describe and ana­lyse Human Resource Man­age­ment (HRM) prac­tices in con­tem­por­ary Hanoi, spe­cific­ally in the con­text of a trans­ition­ing eco­nomy. The sec­ond­ary pur­pose is to assess the suit­ab­il­ity of Groun­ded The­ory based research in the field of Human Resource Management.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper begins by explain­ing the pro­cesses related to trans­ition­ing eco­nom­ies and the role played by Human Resource Man­age­ment. A lit­er­at­ure review of HRM prac­tices in Viet­nam and of Groun­ded The­ory is fol­lowed by a descrip­tion of the research under­taken in Hanoi. The research has been under­taken fol­low­ing a Groun­ded The­ory approach using inter­views as the main source of inform­a­tion. Con­sist­ent with the applic­a­tion of Groun­ded The­ory, no hypo­thesis was formed prior to under­tak­ing the interviews.

Find­ings

Three major find­ings emerged from the qual­it­at­ive data obtained in Hanoi. Firstly, Viet­namese man­agers dis­played a sali­ence for Human Resource Man­age­ment prac­tices that ori­gin­ated in Japan and the West­ern world.

Secondly almost all inter­viewed organ­isa­tions indic­ated to primar­ily use social net­works for recruit­ment; this con­trasts with most Aus­tralian organisations.

Thirdly, it was fond that per­form­ance man­age­ment strategies that align with the col­lect­ive nature of Viet­namese cul­ture are pos­sibly more likely to be effect­ive than indi­vidual based rewards.

Prac­tical implications

Pre­vi­ous research on recruit­ment meth­ods sug­gests a pos­it­ive impact on staff per­form­ance when using social net­works. The use of social net­works is a Viet­namese Human Resource Man­age­ment prac­tice that can poten­tially be used in Aus­tralia. Fur­ther research needs to be con­duc­ted to con­firm the effects of using social net­works as a source of recruit­ment on staff performance.

The find­ings regard­ing per­form­ance man­age­ment have pos­sible implic­a­tions for Viet­namese com­pan­ies strug­gling with staff per­form­ance and motiv­a­tion. As the stated rela­tion­ship between col­lect­iv­ism and per­form­ance man­age­ment is only a hypo­thesis at this time, fur­ther detailed research is required to val­id­ate this.

Over­all, this research shows that the Viet­namese pref­er­ence for for­eign HRM mod­els does not neces­sary lead to best prac­tice. There is scope to develop dis­tinctly Viet­namese model of HRM, which poten­tially can be expor­ted to other countries.

Table of Contents

1. Intro­duc­tion
2. Lit­er­at­ure Review
3. Hanoi Exped­i­tion
4. The­ory Building
5. Ref­er­ences