Among the tasks of management, including international management, is an adaptation to emerging troubles and problems of various kinds. Since the process of managing any business is constantly changing, a human resource management specialist must be able to adapt on the fly with minimal losses. However, the current market conditions are mainly unprecedented due to the uncertainty that has emerged since the development of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The spread of the disease has brought many problems locally, introducing the need for distancing and internationally in the form of travel bans and limited mobility (Caligiuri et al., 2020). A significant challenge that managers have never encountered before is limiting distance and interaction at all levels, from personal to international. Besides, the current pandemic is characterized by spontaneous spread rates, random mutations, and the absence of any accurate predictions. Thus, global uncertainty is formed in the conditions of which it is necessary to navigate differently.
However, at the moment, there is no specifically developed program that would allow human resource managers to navigate such situations. Despite numerous attempts by international companies to adapt to changing conditions, there is practically no complex data describing various types of global uncertainties and strategies to overcome them (Sharma et al., 2020). The presence of proven strategies is extremely important for the entire international business community since stable management is impossible without them. Consequently, there is a clear knowledge gap in the literature that requires filling and research.
This study aims to fill this gap in the literature by exploring the topic through a joint analysis of existing strategies, the situation with the pandemic, and possible consequences. The number of comprehensive studies on this topic is unsatisfactory due to the novelty of the problem. However, the current amount of data is sufficient for a deeper study of the topic. To accomplish this, it is necessary to conduct a survey of past global uncertainties, such as the Great Recession (Berger et al., 2017).
The use of economic statistics collected over many years of observations will allow, in turn, to make predictions about the behavior of the international market (Ersan et al., 2018). Finally, a study of the available articles on the topic of global uncertainties will reveal their impact on various aspects of the economy, from interest rates to the human resource management (Kang et al., 2019). Thus, combining the available data in a cross-sectional study will provide a solution to global uncertainty. The result of the study should be the development of an international human resource management strategy for both the current pandemic situation and possible future disasters.
Several research questions have been put forward to achieve this goal, focused first on collecting data and then on its combination and application in a modern context.
- What is the impact of global uncertainty on macroeconomic, international and local business factors?
- What are the consequences of the presence of global uncertainty in countries with different levels of development and various economic sectors?
- What methods of dealing with global uncertainties have been used in the past, and what results have they had?
- What are the features of the impact on the economy of the global pandemic COVID-19?
- How can existing strategies for dealing with global uncertainties be adapted in the context of COVID-19 and similar situations?
References
Berger, T., Grabert, S., & Kempa, B. (2017). Global macroeconomic uncertainty. Journal of Macroeconomics, 53, 42–56. Web.
Caligiuri, P., De Cieri, H., Minbaeva, D., Verbeke, A., & Zimmermann, A. (2020). International HRM insights for navigating the COVID-19 pandemic: Implications for future research and practice. Journal of International Business Studies, 51, 697–713. Web.
Ersan, O., Akron, S., & Demir, E. (2018). The effect of European and global uncertainty on stock returns of travel and leisure companies. Tourism Economics, 1-16. Web.
Kang, W., Ratti, R. A., & Vespignani, J. (2019). Impact of global uncertainty on the global economy and large developed and developing economies. Applied Economics, 1–16. Web.
Sharma, P., Leung, T. Y., Kingshott, R. P., Davcik, N. S., & Cardinali, S. (2020). Managing uncertainty during a global pandemic: An international business perspective. Journal of Business Research, 116, 188-192. Web.