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Arik Air is one Nigeria’s largest airline and one of the largest airlines in all of Africa

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Arik Air is one Nigeria’s largest airline and one of the largest airlines in all of Africa. Their employment situation is a bit unique in that close to 10 percent of their employees are expatriates. Recruiting and retaining expatriates to work as pilots or other positions in Nigeria can require higher salaries than are typically paid to local workers. However, disparities in wages between expatriates and local employees can lead to resentment. Overall, the human resource situation for a company that operates globally and hires globally such as Arik Air can be quite complicated.

 

Do some research on Arik Air and the human resource situation in Nigeria. Below are a few articles to get you started:

 

Arik Air customer base soars (Jan. 31, 2014). AllAfrica.com. Washington, DC. [Proquest]

 

Nigeria loses N500 billion annually to expatriate pilots. (Jan. 24, 2014). AllAfrica.com. Washington, DC. [Proquest]

Fajana, S., Owoyemi, O., Elegbede, T., & Gbajumo-Sheriff, M. (2011).

Human resource management practices in Nigeria. Journal of Management and Strategy, 2(2), 57. [Proquest]

 

Now suppose that Arik Airlines has been purchased by an American company, which now has to develop a plan to address the issue of hiring and maintaining a well qualified pilot staff and making all of Arik’s employees feel welcome under the new American parent company. Also, suppose that you have been tasked with coming up with a solid human resource plan for the new American owners of Arik Air.   You need to make major decisions such as how much to rely on local staff, how much to rely on employees from the U.S. or other countries, and how to deal with the sensitive issue of how an American company manages local employees who may be resentful of their new owner. In order to do this, you will need to use what you’ve learned in the background materials in this module as well as what you’ve learned in the previous modules about assessing the local environment of a country.

In a four to five page paper, present a strategic human resource plan considering the following issues:

 

1. Go to Hofstede’s webpage (http://geert-hofstede.com/countries.html

and look up the cultural values for both Nigeria and the U.S. Look up the scores of individualism, power distance, and uncertainty avoidance. What major differences do you see between the two cultures? What kind of implications will this have for how the American airline company manages their Nigerian employees?

 

2. Overall what kind of human resource strategy do you think the American company should take to manage Arik Airlines? A geocentric approach, polycentric, or ethnocentric approach? Explain your reasoning, and cite Dlabey, L. & Scott, J. (2006) or Dias (2012) as part of your answer.
3. What kind of mix between Nigerian employees (host-country nationals), American employees (home country nationals), or third country nationals do you think should be hired? What challenges do you see for hiring each type of employee? Explain your reasoning, and cite Dlabey, L. & Scott, J. (2006) or Dias (2012) as part of your answer.

 

 

 

Assignment Expectations

Answer the assignment questions directly

 

Stay focused on the precise assignment questions, don't go off on tangents or devote a lot of space to summarizing general background materials

 

Make sure to use reliable and credible sources as your references. Articles published in established newspapers or business journals/magazines are preferred.       I

 

f you find articles on the internet, make sure it is from a credible source.

Reference your sources of information with both a bibliography and in-text citations. See the Student Guide to Writing a High-Quality Academic Paper , including pages 13-14 on in-text citations. Another resource is the “Writing Style Guide”, which is found under “My Resources” in the TLC portal.