Firms operating with a comfortable slack may not be motivated to invest additional
time and effort required to implement novel practices for HRM in order to increase
the slack (Levinthal/March 1993; Mayrhofer/Brewster 2005). Thus, we reason
that more sophisticated HRM practices and policies will be more common in firms
operating under international competition at home or abroad (Bae/Rowley 2001; Miller/Chen
1994). Competing internationally frequently entails greater uncertainty which
necessitates a more intense husbandry of resources in general and human resources in
particular. In addition, operating on the international scene widens the scope of managerial
tasks often entailing cross-national mobility of personnel which in turn demands
a more thorough approach to HRM. The reasoning above leads to the following
hypotheses