Elements of Expatriate Management

Expatriate selection

Stone (1991) enumerates the following criteria used by companies for expatriate selection: ability to adapt; technical competence; spouse and family adaptability; human relations skill; desire to serve overseas; previous overseas experience; understanding of host country culture; academic qualifications; knowledge of language of country; and understanding of company culture. Additionally, most companies prefer managers who have good interpersonal skills, and are able to establish rapport with different types of people.

Black and Mendenhall (1990) have arranged the adaptive characteristics of expatriates in three clusters:

1. Those associated with resilience, such as high self-esteem and a high threshold for stress.

2. Those associated with the ability to form relationships with people from other cultures, such as tolerance and flexibility.

3. Those associated with the ability to assess, perceive and understand behaviour in new cultures.

An expatriate who possesses technical expertise, but lacks adaptive characteristics from the above three clusters, will be unable to perform satisfactorily. In that event the expatriate may have to leave, either by personal choice or by company request.

The existing literature indicates that although cross-cultural adaptability should play a role in the recruitment of expatriates, in practice insufficient attention is given to this capability. A study of 50 major US firms by Solomon (1994) revealed that 90 per cent of expatriates were selected on the basis of their ability to demonstrate technically superior performance.

All the companies in the case studies in this book have engaged in some form of assessment of the cross-cultural skills of their expatriates. Nestlé carefully grooms potential expatriates, so that by the time they are sent on an international assignment, they have already been exposed to more than one culture.

Multinational corporations are still trying to develop reliable means for predicting 'ability of an expatriate candidate to adapt to a foreign culture'. Multiple sources of information are used to elicit information on this, including in-depth interviews, special instruments, past actual behaviour of the candidate, and behaviour of the candidate in simulations. BMW involves prospective expatriates in problem-solving exercises that require them to sift and analyse actual case studies from other cultures. The problem-solving efforts also involve making a two-week visit to the country where the case study has been set.

Most of the expatriates surveyed for this book reveal a preference for being posted to cosmopolitan cities and towns. Their rationale is that small towns tend to be parochial and provincial, even ethnocentric. Even if expatriates are willing to savour a new culture, they may not be received into the mainstream of that culture. Although an expatriate is expected to make the lion's share of the effort in achieving assimilation, the process is two-way. The give and take of assimilation is most likely to be evidenced in a cosmopolitan, pluralistic city, with a population that is international in orientation. The choice of Singapore as the location for Credit Suisse's Project Copernicus has enabled the company to attract best-of-breed expatriates.