A paper coauthored by Associate Professor Ting Liu (lead author) and Professor Tomoki Sekiguchi of the Kyoto University Graduate School of Management, together with Associate Professor Ya Xi Shen (Hunan University), Assistant Professor Jiayin Qin (University of Tsukuba), and Professor Kai Chi Yam (National University of Singapore), titled “Understanding Talent in Foreign Subsidiaries: A Review, Synthesis, and Way Forward,” has been published in the Journal of Management Studies, a top-tier journal in the field of management.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/joms.13280

Foreign subsidiaries of multinational companies (MNCs) are the frontline where headquarters’ strategies meet the realities of local markets and institutions. Their effectiveness depends on the diverse knowledge, experience, and collaborative efforts of the people who work within them. This paper synthesizes two decades of research on talent in foreign subsidiaries and systematically examines who works in subsidiaries and how their capabilities develop into organizational-level human capital resources. 

The authors show that employees’ knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics (KSAOs) strengthen subsidiaries through two mechanisms. The first is accumulation effects, in which similar expertise builds up. The second is complementarity effects, in which diverse strengths are combined. These processes give rise to four types of organizational-level human capital resources: local, corporate, subsidiary, and international. Each type is associated with different strategic outcomes.

A further contribution of the paper is its focus on whether employees are assigned from headquarters or hired locally. This perspective helps clarify groups of employees that are common in practice yet have received limited attention in previous research, such as locally hired parent-country nationals and self-initiated international movers. The study positions these groups within a broader framework of subsidiary talent.

An introductory blog about the paper is available at the following link.
https://managementstudiesinsights.com/rethinking-talent-in-foreign-subsidiaries-what-really-drives-strategic-outcomes/