Developing a Culturally Synergistic Approach to International Human Resource Management Maddy Janssens This paper offers international human resource (IHR) professionals guidelines how to decide which IHRM approach to choose. In choosing among an adaptive, exportive, or integrated IHR approach, IHR managers may want to consider three decision criteria, e.g. forces for global integration and local adaptation, the cultural component of HRM, and the power dynamics within the MNC. To develop an organization that values cultural differences, IHR professionals may choose a culturally synergistic approach to IHRM. This approach has the potential of designing new combinations of HRM practices and simultaneously attends to the three decision criteria. A large U.S. based company ac- quired several years ago a small, successful Belgian company. While headquarters (HQ) initially managed the merger in a very decentralized ap- proach, they recently moved towards a more centralized approach. It was the strong belief of the company’s president that the global world has no geograph- ical boundaries, which led to the imple- mentation of several uniform policies, not only in the core domain of R&D but also, in the area of human resource management (HRM). An example here was the corporate message that turnover in the Belgian plant was too low. It was HQ’s belief that a dynamic and result- oriented company has a turnover of ap- proximately 15%. Because turnover in the Belgian affiliate was even lower than 5%, the Belgian HR department was informed about the following deci- sion. They had to work out a perfor- mance appraisal system with forced choice to weed out the bad performers. All employees had to be evaluated dur- ing the following year and the evalua- tion scores needed to reflect a Gauss curve. Those employees who had the lowest scores were presented with a choice: improve or be fired. The Bel- gian HR team hired a consultancy orga- nization to implement the appraisal pro- Dr. M. Janssens, Katholicka Universiteit Leuven, Dept of Applied Economic Sciences, Naame- sestraat 69, 3000 Leuven, Belgium maddy.janssens@econ.kulewven.ac.be. Deciding An IHRM Approach 429