Leadership Talent Staffing in Foreign Entities of Multinational Companies during Crisis: New Challenges and Lessons for the Future

Objective: Rational leadership talent management (LTM) is a current challenge for HRM, which may have an impact on the performance of an organisation. The main aim of the paper is to find dissimilarities in the approaches to leadership talent staffing in the pre-pandemic and pandemic periods, and their relationship to centralisation, transfer of knowledge, and the results of an organisation. Research Design & Methods: The research sample consists of 200 nonfinancial companies headquartered in Central Europe with foreign entities located around the world. The research results were collected by using the CATI method and analysed by principal component analysis (PCA). Findings: The analysis used shows that there are factors which describe statistically important differences in the number and type of LTM practices characteristic of staffing those potential leaders, and their relationship with centralisation, transfer of knowledge, and the results of multinational companies in the pre-pandemic and pandemic periods. Implications / Recommendations: The results lead to the conclusion that in difficult conditions the approach to staffing is precisely focused on specific areas, maybe because of their decreasing role in the financial results of an organisation. Contribution: The research is of an innovative character. The wealth of data allows for further analysis in search of other dependencies and modelling of LTM practices, including those related to staffing.