Samenvatting

Will multinational SMEs use internationalisation to achieve labour cost savings at the expense of employees both in their home country and abroad or will they transfer their existing employee-oriented practices to their foreign subsidiaries? This paper argues that the answer to this question is affected by: (1) the salience of employees at home as well as abroad to management; (2) the type of employee-relations arrangements in use within the company; (3) the capability to develop and use high-performance human resource instruments for employee-oriented CSR practices; (4) the capability to adapt the type and design of high-performance human resource instruments to the local institutional environment; (5) the extent to which the multinational SME possesses institutional capital. Multinational SMEs with slack resources, a high degree of institutional capital, and to which employees are highly salient, are most likely to transfer employee-oriented CSR practices abroad and to do so successfully.