The central theme of this dissertation is to examine how ownership influences the human resource (HR) outcomes of organizations, including the adoption of HR strategies and HR-related performance such as employee turnover. I focus on two specific types of ownership arrangements – state ownership and franchise ownership. In Essay 1, I argue that state ownership influences the HR strategies that Chinese multinational corporations (MNCs) adopt to control their developed-market subsidiaries. Findings indicate that private sector businesses (PSBs) and state-owned enterprises (SOEs) vary in their agency problems and thus develop different HR strategies to exert control. PSBs tend to adopt an “alliance-based” HR system, which seek to strengthen the mutual dependence between global headquarters and foreign subsidiaries. By contrast, SOEs are likely to adopt a “mediation-based” HR system, limiting the target of control to home-country expatriates who serve as the intermediary between headquarters and subsidiaries. Drawing on the unfolding model of turnover, Essay 2 explores the individual psychological mechanisms through which state ownership influences board members’ turnover. I find that a firm’s deviance from the government’s agenda induces “red” directors, who are either incumbent or prior government officials serving on the board of directors, to leave their organizations. Red directors’ political embeddedness, which is conceptualized and measured by board members’ social connections with SOEs, strengthens their reactions to political deviance. In Essay 3, I argue that the growth of franchise brands affects franchisees’ investment in HR management. Growth in brand size creates pressure for franchisees to invest in standardized skill-enhancing HR practices while providing incentives to underinvest in motivation-enhancing HR practices that are left for the discretion of franchisees. The governance strategies adopted by franchisors influence franchisees’ responses to the growth of the system. This dissertation project employed both quantitative and qualitative data analysis. I collected data from multiple sources, including semi-structured interviews, archival documents, nation-wide surveys, third-party databases, and manually coded databases. To analyze the qualitative data, I adopted a thematic approach to identify emergent concepts and clarified the relationships among these concepts. The quantitative data analysis included random effects model and hierarchical linear modeling.