CRITICAL ISSUES ON THE SELECTION OF OFFSHORING MANAGERS

摘要

Outsourcing has become one of the most obvious business trends. The dominant form oftoday’s outsourcing is offshoring, or outsourcing to a different country. Firms in westerncountries with rich capital resources and enormous consumer markets, have come torealize that outsourcing functions in human resources management, IT, operations, andeven customer service to countries with low labor costs is a viable strategy to survive andbe competitive. While research on outshoring is abundant, little has been studied on thehuman resource element, particularly the effect of knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs)that an outshoring manager (OM) possesses on the success of an outshoring project.Because an OM is unique in many aspects compared with a typical business manager;he/she should not only have general KSAs required of a manager, but also master someunique culture-oriented KSAs in order to perform effectively on the position. Therefore,the selection tests commonly used for manager selection may be inadequate. This paperintends to propose a framework that highlights the importance of a few KSAs unique tothe selection of outsourcing managers (OMs).