Globalisation

IMPACT OF GLOBALIZATION ON THE HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT FUNCTION IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES: A CASE STUDY OF KENYA PUBLIC CORPORATIONS Hazel Gachoka Gachunga1
Abstract Globalization has a major impact on the management of human resources in developing countries including Kenya. It has led to homogenization and convergence in organization strategies, structures and processes as well as in consumer choice. With accelerating globalization, organizations have had to change and new trends have set in even in the management of human resources. Globalization has led to changes in organization design and organization structures are leaner thus improving efficiency but having a negative impact on staff numbers which have had to be reduced. This means employees have been retrenched in many sectors like telecommunications, the Kenya Railways and the Kenya public service sectors in order for those organizations to gain competitive advantage. Reward management systems have changed and even the human resource planning strategy is to have a leaner staff in the core areas and to hire part time workers in a bid to reduce costs and to enable the business to run profitably and efficiently. The non-core jobs have been outsourced which has led to an increase in independent contractors to service industries. However, the homogeneity that results from globalization has had a major effect in developing countries because of brain drain. Globalization can therefore be said to have had a phenomenal impact on a developing economy like Kenya that is both positive and negative as explored in the paper.

INTRODUCTION Globalization was defined by Giddens (1990) as the ‘intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring miles away and vice versa’. This definition embodies some interrelated ideas, of “accelerating interdependence” (Ohmae, 1989), of “action at a distance” (Giddens, 1990) and of “time–space

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