Geopolitical Risk, Human Resource Strategy, and Practices: A Systematic Literature Review and Integrative Conceptual Framework

Abstract

Geopolitical risk has returned as a key characteristic of the global operating environment, with practitioner evaluations placing geoeconomic confrontation and armed conflict amongst the top near-term risks to organizations globally. Human resource management is the hub of this exposure as it is not just capital and the supply chain that needs to be moved, but human resources too, that need to be protected, retained, and reorganized in the event of geopolitical shocks. However, synthesis has been lagging behind practice in academia. The focus of previous systematic reviews on geopolitical risk has been on supply chain resilience and multinational enterprise strategic decision-making, with the human resource dimension treated as a ‘moving target’ and conceptually dispersed between the broader expatriate safety literature and the distinct literatures on expatriate talent flight, workforce localization, and crisis-oriented international human resource management. This paper aims to fill that gap by conducting a systematic literature review in a framework-based manner using the Theory, Context, Characteristics and Methodology (TCCM) approach to literature review of the scholarship in the field of geopolitical risk environment and human resource strategy and practice. The review combines theoretical content from the institutional, resource-based, human capital and macro talent management theories, shows the empirical environments of the scholarship's focus, from sanctioned economies to conflict and hostile-environment assignments, and to workforce localization regimes, and illustrates the antecedents, responses and results of organizations in this scholarship. On this basis, the research extends the analysis by proposing an integrative conceptual model, Geopolitically-Responsive Human Resource Management (GR-HRM), that is structured on the four contiguous practice dimensions that appear to be enduring: risk anticipation and intelligence, workforce mobility and duty of care, talent retention and localization, and organizational resilience architecture, and around the mechanisms through which geopolitical disruption brings about human resource outcomes. The paper concludes by examining the theoretical, methodological, and managerial implications of considering geopolitical risk as a fundamental HRM issue, versus a crisis response function on the periphery.