Rizwan Tahir - Featured Faculty 2013

Rizwan Tahir's academic research interests lies in the areas of foreign direct investment, internationalization and market entry strategies, international human resource management and businesses in Arab cultures. His earlier work focused on foreign investment related issues (e.g. location choices, timing of entry, ownership arrangements, joint venture arrangements including partner selection and performance in the cross-cultural context). Dr Tahir's PhD dissertation considered the FDI behavior of Finnish manufacturing firms in Asian countries. 
This research has been extended into comparative studies of FDI behavior of Finnish companies with Australian/New Zealand companies. It was found that antipodean companies tended to invest in countries with very high political stability, low cultural distance between host and home countries, low wage rates, and highly skilled labor. 


Dr. Tahir more recent work has considered international issues in human resource management, particularly expatriation and repatriation of managers. When multinational companies send key staff overseas to manage what is typically large and strategic projects, how effective are they? When these managers return to their home countries, how easily are they re-assimilated into their company? 
His recent study of female repatriate managers in Australian and New Zealand (ANZ) companies, has recently been published in the Global Business Review highlighted those female repatriate managers in the ANZ companies returning home experienced great frustration in reintegrating with their parent companies. Their overseas experience and the knowledge they gained were neither valued nor used. Often those managers left their companies within a year or two, meaning that their international expertise and contacts were lost to the company. Without active policies to reintegrate expatriate managers, companies risk losing what are often their best and most visionary staff, as well as repeating over and over again fundamental mistakes in managing overseas subsidiaries. 
 Dr. Tahir's current research looks at the experience of managers from the UAE, and those Australian and New Zealand expats working in the UAE in foreign companies. The results will help companies to apply best practice in this aspect of international HR management and cross-cultural management.