Research Method

Formal inter­views have been con­duc­ted in five privately-owned organ­isa­tions, selec­ted by Hanoi Uni­ver­sity, a research part­ner of the Gradu­ate School of Man­age­ment. Two of the inter­viewees were European man­agers work­ing for Viet­namese com­pan­ies. All respond­ents were uni­ver­sity edu­cated males between the age of 30 and 50. Only three inter­views were ded­ic­ated to Human Resource Man­age­ment as respond­ents were shared with other research groups in the Hanoi expedition.

The research was under­taken fol­low­ing the Straus­sian school of Groun­ded The­ory (Jones and Noble 2007). All inter­views were con­duc­ted very openly and cov­er­ing a wide range of top­ics across the field of Human Resource Man­age­ment (Appendix B on page 50) and no hypo­thesis was defined prior to the data col­lec­tion pro­cess. The ques­tion­naire was loosely fol­lowed to allow for an open dia­logue between the inter­view­ers and the respond­ents. Depend­ing on the reac­tion of the respond­ent, cer­tain top­ics were dis­cussed in more detail than was the case with other inter­views. This method of inter­view­ing allowed for greater flex­ib­il­ity and for gath­er­ing con­tex­tu­ally rich inform­a­tion. It also provided an atmo­sphere in which par­ti­cipants were more open to provide data than would be the case in a closed interview.

All par­ti­cipants were fully informed about the pur­pose of the inter­view by means of a Par­ti­cipant Con­sent Form. This con­tained, besides the con­sent form, also a form to with­draw con­sent and an out­line of the gen­eric pur­pose of the exped­i­tion. This form did, how­ever, not con­tain a return address to sub­mit the request and as such, no with­draw­als have been received. One par­ti­cipant was will­ing to be inter­viewed, but refused to sign the con­sent form. The inter­view con­tin­ued, but the data has not been used in the report. All data obtained from the inter­views remains con­fid­en­tial. Par­ti­cip­at­ing or– gan­isa­tions and man­agers have been deiden­ti­fied in this report. The raw research data is kept by the authors and will be des­troyed after the res­ults of the sub­ject have been pub­lished by the University.

A col­lect­ive applic­a­tion for all research groups in the Hanoi exped­i­tion was sub­mit­ted to the Uni­ver­sity Human Eth­ics Com­mit­tee (UHEC). The applic­a­tion ((Uni­ver­sity Human Eth­ics Com­mit­tee 2009: 22g) excludes record­ing of the inter­view. No ver­batim tran­scripts have thus been pre­pared and ana­lysis relied solely on notes taken dur­ing the inter­view. Although some pro­ponents of groun­ded the­ory argue against tap­ing and tran­scrib­ing of inter­views (Charmaz 2006), it was found to be a restrict­ive require­ment for this research. In one inter­view, the respond­ent was a Ger­man expat­ri­ate who only spoke Viet­namese and Ger­man. Since no Viet­namese trans­lator was present, one of the research­ers con­duc­ted the inter­view in Ger­man, sim­ul­tan­eously trans­lat­ing to the other research­ers and tak­ing notes. The dir­ect­ive not to record inter­views restric­ted the research and con­strained the qual­ity of the data as the dynam­ics of the inter­view not always allowed accur­ate note taking.

After each inter­view, the raw notes were tran­scribed by both research­ers and in those cases were both were present, notes were com­pared to ensure con­sist­ency. The raw data was col­lated into a single doc­u­ment and coded in accord­ance with the stand­ard pro­ced­ures in Groun­ded The­ory, as described in the pre­vi­ous chapter. After Cod­ing, seven cat­egor­ies emerged from the data, some of which with their own sub­cat­egor­ies. Sort­ing of all data revealed that some cat­egor­ies are linked to each other (such as Motiv­a­tion and Reward).

A semantic dia­gram was used to pre­pare a memo for each cat­egory. Extens­ive memo­ing has been under­taken dur­ing the exped­i­tion itself and the ana­lysis was sub­stan­tially com­plete upon return­ing to Australia.

Based on this inform­a­tion, three cat­egor­ies were selec­ted for fur­ther ana­lysis, i.e. Viet­namese Style HRM, Recruit­ment and Motiv­a­tion. Fur­ther lit­er­at­ure review on the selec­ted cat­egor­ies has been under­taken, enabling the for­mu­la­tion of three hypo­theses. The lim­ited amount of data did not allow draw­ing any firm con­clu­sions about these phe­nom­ena. The last step in the research was the iden­ti­fic­a­tion of a Core Cat­egory. It was found that the Core Cat­egory, bind­ing all observed phe­nom­ena, is Col­lect­iv­ism. In order to stay as close as pos­sible to the ori­ginal words of the respond­ents, the raw data has been tran­scribed into four vign­ettes, which are provided in the next chapter, after which a detailed ana­lysis of the data is provided.

6. Res­ults

6.1 Com­pany A

Mr A is the man­ager of a busi­ness depart­ment in a large dis­tri­bu­tion com­pany based in Hanoi. The core com­pet­ency of this organ­isa­tion is the export and import of rice. In excel­lent Eng­lish, Mr A explained that the busi­ness has recently hori­zont­ally expan­ded into the retail industry and cur­rently oper­ates some con­veni­ence stores and a super­mar­ket in the city. They are com­mit­ted to expand their pres­ence in retail, but are on a steep learn­ing curve.

They struggle with over­seas com­pet­i­tion because for­eign com­pan­ies have easier access to cap­ital, bet­ter know­ledge of the retail industry and bet­ter Human Resource Man­age­ment sys­tems. The main issue is that over­seas com­pan­ies have good train­ing mod­els and a “HR struc­ture”. Com­pany A is devel­op­ing and imple­ment­ing a suit­able HRM approach with the assist­ance of con­sult­ants. They use Japan­ese and West­ern mod­els as a ref­er­ence, but select only those aspects they find suit­able. Mr A smil­ingly said: “West­ern or Japan­ese model is not suit­able”, but he did not provide details on how he determ­ines which meth­ods are more likely to be suitable.

6.2 Com­pany B

Mr B is the man­ager of a large depart­ment store that focuses on home improve­ment, fur­niture and related products. He was expat­ri­ated from Ger­many a few months prior to the inter­view, which was con­duc­ted in Ger­man. He exper­i­ences dif­fi­culties in trans­form­ing the busi­ness because Viet­namese man­agers shy away from internal con­flict and are always look­ing for har­mony. Mr B is of the opin­ion that some internal con­flict is required to make the busi­ness more suc­cess­ful. When asked his view on what it takes to be suc­cess­ful an European man­ager in Viet­nam he res­ol­utely answered: “adapt or die”.

He believes that the rate of social change in Viet­nam is very fast and he anti­cip­ates social unrest because of this. Not in the form of riots or demon­stra­tions, but through “passiv­ität”, best trans­lated as pass­ive res­ist­ance against cap­it­al­ist values.

He exper­i­ences trouble motiv­at­ing local staff and showed stat­ist­ics that the labour cost to turnover ratio in Viet­nam is more than four times higher than in Ger­many. One of the reas­ons for this is that almost half of the store’s employ­ees are secur­ity staff. Shoplift­ing is a big prob­lem and to deter people from steal­ing, pho­tos of shoplift­ers that were caught are dis­played at the store entrance. Mr B believes this works as a deterrent because it is a way to ensure that shoplift­ers lit­er­ally “lose face”.

Indi­vidual pro­ductiv­ity is, as shown by the above fig­ures, very low in his busi­ness. Mr B believes this is a leftover of the trans­ition from a Planned Eco­nomy, where there was high job secur­ity and no drivers to increase pro­ductiv­ity. Being from former East Ger­many, he has seen a sim­ilar trans­ition. How­ever, he is of the opin­ion that the uptake of cap­it­al­ist val­ues by his staff is going slowly com­pared to his own exper­i­ence. He said that the Viet­namese have an expect­a­tion of a job for life, without the require­ment to be productive.

The busi­ness is intro­du­cing Key Per­form­ance Indic­ator (KPI) based salar­ies. He believes, how­ever, that it is more import­ant to reward sub­ject­ive meas­ures first because these are most lack­ing, i.e. keep­ing the store clean, cor­rect mer­chand­ising and so on, rather than focus­ing on sales volumes. This relates back to the prob­lems with staff motiv­a­tion men­tioned earlier.

6.3 Com­pany C

Mr C is the Fin­ance Man­ager of a privately owned dis­tri­bu­tion and logist­ics com­pany that main­tains trucks and ware­houses, employ­ing about 2,000 people.

When Com­pany C recruits staff, they fol­low a three step pro­cess. First they review exist­ing staff, then they use informal net­works to find suit­able people. Last option is to use a “Headhunter”, i.e. external recruit­ment agen­cies. The selec­tion pro­cess depends on the vacancy they seek to fill. For middle and lower staff, the pro­cess involves psy­cho­lo­gical test­ing (IQ) and prac­tical tests to ascer­tain whether they are suit­able. For high level pos­i­tions, no test­ing is under­taken and Com­pany C relies on ref­er­ences. Inter­views with applic­ants are under­taken after the test­ing or obtain­ing references.

An import­ant selec­tion cri­terion for Com­pany C is the applicant’s per­ceived adapt­ab­il­ity to their busi­ness cul­ture. They tar­get Viet­namese people that work at mul­tina­tional cor­por­a­tions (MNC) because of their exper­i­ence with work­ing in an occi­dental man­age­ment envir­on­ment. How­ever, these people find it hard to fit back into a Viet­namese busi­ness after work­ing for an MNC.

The main dif­fer­ence between Com­pany C and an inter­na­tion­ally owned com­pany is that in the lat­ter, everything is very pro­ced­ur­ised by using “SOP or some­thing like that”, they fol­low steps “A, B and C”. In Com­pany C there are no strict pro­ced­ures to be fol­lowed and some people, par­tic­u­larly those that have worked for an MNC for a while, “get con­fused about what to do next”. They need staff who are able to work in this environment.

Com­pany C wants to upgrade their HR sys­tems to match that of MNCs that oper­ate in Viet­nam. They believe the best way to achieve this is use a west­ern HRM model, adap­ted to Viet­namese cul­ture. Mr C reads West­ern man­age­ment text­books, but chooses select­ively on what to apply. They try to duplic­ate the sys­tems used by MNC in Vietnam.

In Com­pany C, lower and middle staff fol­low train­ing on the job. They are devel­op­ing the “soft skills” of middle man­age­ment. There are no cul­tural issues with imple­ment­ing west­ern HRM mod­els in the lower ech­el­ons because “lower people fol­low orders”. Viet­namese people are not fond of per­sonal devel­op­ment bey­ond a cer­tain point. There is cur­rently no cul­ture of “learn­ing forever”. This is the old atti­tude and Mr C believes that a future reces­sion will change that mindset.

Salar­ies are based on Key Per­form­ance Indic­at­ors, but they are dif­fer­ent for each depart­ment. In sales, 20–30% of salary is depend­ent upon achieve­ment sales volumes. Most staff mem­bers have indi­vidual KPIs. Sec­ond­ary con­di­tions such as annual leave, health care and share options exist for for higher level pos­i­tions. Ter­tiary con­di­tions focus around staff out­ings, which is a Viet­namese tradition.

6.4 Com­pany D

Com­pany D is act­ive in the hos­pit­al­ity industry and oper­ates sev­eral pubs and res­taur­ants in Hanoi and H? Chí Minh City, tar­get­ing West­ern expat­ri­ates and trav­el­lers. Mr D is the part owner and man­ager of the busi­ness. He is ori­gin­ally from the United King­dom and moved to Hanoi sev­eral years ago. He speaks Viet­namese and is able to com­mu­nic­ate with staff in their own lan­guage. Mr D has no formal man­age­ment edu­ca­tion and has a back­ground in retail and pubs in Eng­land. This is where he has obtained a keen insight in the mar­ket­ing of services.

One of the other own­ers of Com­pany D also owns a char­ity in which street chil­dren are provided with an oppor­tun­ity to be trained in hos­pit­al­ity. Through this con­nec­tion, Com­pany D is oper­ated with a strong sense of social cor­por­ate respons­ib­il­ity. There is a strict sep­ar­a­tion between the char­ity and the busi­ness and they thus do not hire gradu­ates from the char­ity. Com­pany D recruits most of its staff from the groups of people that were not able to obtain a place in the char­ity train­ing pro­gram, but are con­sidered suit­able. The selec­tion is fol­lowed by a con­ver­sa­tion with Mr D, another man­ager and a Viet­namese staff mem­ber. The can­did­ate has already been selec­ted, so this is only an intro­duc­tion to the busi­ness. Com­pany D occa­sion­ally uses social net­works to find new staff and expert jobs, such as account­ants, are advert­ised. The suc­cess of their approach is illus­trated by one girl who used to sell eggs in the street, became a cash­ier and is now study­ing to be an accountant.

The com­pany focuses strongly on train­ing and Mr D proudly men­tioned that a former wait­ress, who is now the train­ing man­ager of Com­pany D, will soon move to Mel­bourne to under­take hos­pit­al­ity train­ing at TAFE. Most new recruits are about 20 years old and have a basic know­ledge of Eng­lish because they used to shine shoes or sell light­ers and so on. Because most new recruits are former street chil­dren, train­ing of new staff mem­bers with the basics, includ­ing per­sonal hygiene. All train­ing is under­taken in-house through a ment­or­ing sys­tem and for large groups by the train­ing man­ager. They just opened a new res­taur­ant, for
which took six months to train all staff. New recruits have three months to learn the trade and start “bust­ing tables and clean­ing ash­trays”. Mr D is devel­op­ing a staff hand­book in Viet­namese and Eng­lish. The hand­book focuses on their rights and provides an over­view of organ­isa­tional values.

Com­pany C provides a wide range of bene­fits, includ­ing help with accom­mod­a­tion, interest free loans, vac­cin­a­tions, Eng­lish classes, med­ical pro­gram (they even paid for heart sur­gery for one staff mem­ber) and a med­ical checks. They also provide a uni­form and some new clothes for new staff, because they have no ward­robe of their own.

Some suc­cess­ful staff have been given a share in the com­pany as a bonus. These are full shares which make them eli­gible to become a com­pany dir­ector. They also provide free meals to staff when they are at work. Salary is per­form­ance based, which is meas­ured sub­ject­ively through con­ver­sa­tion with their mentor. Some staff have doubled their salary in three months. Every two years they take their staff on an all expenses paid trip. They also provide trans­port to wed­dings and funerals.

It is a com­pany rule that staff are not sup­posed to stand still and always look for an oppor­tun­ity to provide cus­tomer ser­vice. Mr D said that Viet­namese jobs are usu­ally quiet inact­ive and it takes some effort to ingrain this beha­viour. Mr D also recoun­ted an epis­ode where he pub­licly escor­ted a staff mem­ber out of the premises because he was caught steal­ing. This caused prob­lems for him because both the staff mem­ber and he lost face.

Table of Contents

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