Performance management practices within emerging market multinational enterprises: the case of Brazilian multinationals

This study advances our understanding of HRM within EM-MNEs by examining the extent to, and mechanism by, which Brazilian MNEs standardize or localise their performance management (PM) policies and practices, and the factors that influence their design and implementation. We explored these issues through qualitative case studies of three Brazilian MNEs. The analysis of interview data reveals a strong tendency for Brazilian MNEs to centralise and standardise their PM policies and practices. The key finding of this paper is that PM practices within Brazilian MNEs are not based on indigenous Brazilian practices, but rather, are heavily influenced by global best practices. The findings are at odds with previous research, which suggests that EM-MNEs apply different HR practices in developed country subsidiaries and developing country subsidiaries. Also, contrary to expectations, our results indicate that institutional distance does not have a significant influence on the adaptation of PM practices at subsidiary level

A Multistart Heuristic for the Equality Generalized Traveling Salesman Problem

We study the Generalized Traveling Salesman Problem (GTSP), which is a variant of the well-known Traveling Salesman Problem. We are given an undirected graph G=(V,E), with set of nodes V and set of edges E, each with an associated cost. The set of nodes is partitioned into clusters. We focus on the so-called E-GTSP, where "E" stands for "Equality". E-GTSP is to find an elementary cycle visiting exactly one node for each cluster, and minimizing the sum of the costs of the traveled edges. We propose a multi-start heuristic algorithm, which iteratively starts with a randomly chosen set of nodes and applies a decomposition approach combined with improvement procedures. The decomposition approach considers a first phase to determine the visiting order of the clusters and a second phase to find the corresponding minimum cost cycle. We show the effectiveness of the proposed approach on benchmark instances from the literature