Expatriate Experiences

Expatriate Experiences:
A Comparison of Current Expatriate Experiences to the Relevant Literature, Using Interviews with Former Expatriates in the Pacific Northwest

Licentiate Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Economic and Social Sciences of the University of Bern, Switzerland

Professor: Prof. Dr. Norbert Thom Teaching Assistant: Anja Habegger, lic. rer. pol. Supervising Professor in Seattle: Prof. Richard B. Peterson

Institute for Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management Engehaldenstrasse 4 CH-3012 Bern, Switzerland

Department for Management and Organization, University of Washington Business School Seattle, WA 98105-3200, United States of America

by: Annette Bossard from Luzern, Switzerland Student ID number: 98-102-544 4714 17th Ave NE # 11 Seattle, WA 98105 United States of America

Seattle, April 27, 2003

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Preface
“You cannot do anything without patience if you’re going abroad.”1

I wish to express my thanks to all the people who supported me and made it possible for me to have this great opportunity of spending half a year in the USA and writing a thesis on a topic which has always interested me and which I found more and more fascinating, the longer I was working on it. First of all, I have to thank Prof. Norbert Thom from the University of Bern whithout whose consent and support I would not have been able to do this in the first place. I am very grateful to Prof. Richard B. Peterson from the University of Washington who has been a great support for me during these past six months and has helped me in so many ways. I would also like to thank my parents and my boyfriend Christof in Switzerland who supported the idea of me going abroad from the very first moment. And last but not least, my thanks go the expatriates at the various companies here in the Pacific Northwest who were very helpful and cooperative and gave me so much interesting information about their overseas experiences in the interviews. It has been a great pleasure for me to do this study and work together with the people here in the U.S. “You were privileged to have such an opportunity... in every sense of the word” one of the expats said to me, and I can only agree with that.

Seattle, April 27, 2003

Annette Bossard

1

An American expatriate after returning from an overseas assignment (this is also true for my own experience).

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Table of Contents
Preface .........................................................................................................................................I Table of Contents ...................................................................................................................... II Figures ....................................................................................................................................... V Tables ........................................................................................................................................ V Abbreviations ...........................................................................................................................VI 1 Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 1

1.1 Introduction to International Human Resource Management and Expatriation, Problem to be Examined........................................................................................................... 1
1.1.1 International Human Resource Management (IHRM) ........................................................... 1 1.1.2 Expatriation............................................................................................................................. 4 1.1.2.1 Definition.......................................................................................................................... 4 1.1.2.2 Increasing Importance of Business Expatriates ................................................................ 5 1.1.2.3 Facts about Expatriates ..................................................................................................... 5 1.1.3 The Importance of Cultural Differences ................................................................................. 6

1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 2 2.1 2.2

Objective of this Paper, Methodology ............................................................................ 7 Boundaries ...................................................................................................................... 8 State of the Research on Expatriation, Other Lines of Research.................................... 8 Structure of this Paper .................................................................................................... 9 Literature Review............................................................................................................ 10 Introduction................................................................................................................... 10 The Selection Procedure ............................................................................................... 11

2.2.1 The Empirical Findings of Previous Studies ........................................................................ 11 2.2.2 Recommendations................................................................................................................. 12

2.3

Cross-Cultural Training, Preparation for the Assignment............................................ 14

2.3.1 The Empirical Findings of Previous Studies ........................................................................ 15 2.3.2 Recommendations................................................................................................................. 16

2.4

The Adjustment Process ............................................................................................... 18
2.4.1.1 The U-Curve Theory (UCT)........................................................................................... 20 2.4.1.2 The Three Dimensions of Adjustment, and Factors of Influence................................... 23

2.4.1 The Underlying Theory ........................................................................................................ 18

2.4.2 The Empirical Findings of Previous Studies ........................................................................ 24 2.4.3 Recommendations................................................................................................................. 26

2.5 2.6

Cross-Cultural Competencies Necessary for a Successful Expatriate Assignment..... 28 Performance, Success, and Failure ............................................................................... 29

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2.6.1 Failure Rates ......................................................................................................................... 29 2.6.2 Organizational Commitment................................................................................................. 30 2.6.3 Reasons for Failure ............................................................................................................... 31 2.6.4 Expatriate Performance Appraisal ........................................................................................ 32

2.7

Repatriation................................................................................................................... 33

2.7.1 The Empirical Findings of Previous Studies ........................................................................ 33 2.7.2 Recommendations................................................................................................................. 35

2.8

Conceptual Framework................................................................................................. 36

2.8.1 Factors of Influence .............................................................................................................. 36 2.8.2 Reasons, Purposes................................................................................................................. 37 2.8.3 Direct Action Parameters...................................................................................................... 38 2.8.4 Efficiency and Effectiveness of the Expatriate Management ............................................... 38 2.8.5 Graphical Presentation.......................................................................................................... 39

3 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 4 4.1 4.2

Method used for the Empirical Research...................................................................... 40 Qualitative vs. Quantitative Research........................................................................... 40 Semi-Structured, Qualitative Interviews ...................................................................... 41 Sample, Response Rate................................................................................................. 43 Research Questions....................................................................................................... 45 Data Analysis................................................................................................................ 46 Discussion of the Results ................................................................................................. 47 Demographics of Respondents, Background Information............................................ 47 Adjustment.................................................................................................................... 50
4.2.1.1 Adjustment to the New Work Environment ................................................................... 52 4.2.1.2 Adjustment to Interaction with Host Nationals .............................................................. 53 4.2.1.3 Adjustment to the General Non-Work Environment in the Host Country ..................... 54 4.2.1.4 Psychological Adjustment .............................................................................................. 55 4.2.2 Culture Shock and the U-Curve of Adjustment.................................................................... 56 4.2.3 Company Support during the Period of Adjustment............................................................. 59 4.2.4 Correlates of Adjustment ...................................................................................................... 61 4.2.5 Family Adjustment ............................................................................................................... 66

4.2.1 The Dimensions of Adjustment ............................................................................................ 50

4.3

The HR Practices as they are Experienced by the Expats ............................................ 68

4.3.1 General.................................................................................................................................. 68 4.3.2 Selection ............................................................................................................................... 69 4.3.3 Training................................................................................................................................. 72 4.3.4 Performance Evaluation........................................................................................................ 76

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4.4

Repatriation, Future Career .......................................................................................... 80

4.4.1 The Difficulties of Coming Home ........................................................................................ 80 4.4.2 Expatriate Assignments and Career Paths ............................................................................ 83 4.4.2.1 General Findings............................................................................................................. 83 4.4.2.2 Corporate Career Development Activities...................................................................... 85 4.4.2.3 Communication within the Company ............................................................................. 86 4.4.2.4 Corporate Repatriation Policy ........................................................................................ 87 4.4.2.5 Job upon Repatriation..................................................................................................... 89

4.5

The Expatriates’ Feelings and Attitudes....................................................................... 95

4.5.1 General Attitude and Motivation to go Abroad .................................................................... 95 4.5.2 Attitude toward the Country and Company .......................................................................... 98 4.5.3 Relationship with the Local Staff and with other Expatriates ............................................ 103 4.5.4 Different Aspects of Satisfaction........................................................................................ 107

4.6

Other Findings ............................................................................................................ 108
4.6.1.1 Performance.................................................................................................................. 108 4.6.1.2 Cross-Cultural Competencies ....................................................................................... 110

4.6.1 Self-Assessment of the Expatriates’ Performance and Cross-Cultural Competencies ....... 108

4.6.2 Factors that Influence the Expatriate Experience ............................................................... 113

5 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5

Findings and Conclusions ............................................................................................. 116 Summary of Main Conclusions .................................................................................. 116 Limitations.................................................................................................................. 122 Recommendations for Practitioners............................................................................ 123 Future Research .......................................................................................................... 126 Closing Remarks......................................................................................................... 126

Appendix ................................................................................................................................128 Appendix A: Interview Guideline.................................................................................... 128 Appendix B: Letter Sent to HR Representatives ............................................................. 134 References ..............................................................................................................................136 Independence ..........................................................................................................................144

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Figures
Figure 1: Model of International HRM ......................................................................................2 Figure 2: The U-Curve of Cross-Cultural Adjustment.............................................................21 Figure 3: Framework of International Adjustment...................................................................23 Figure 4: Conceptual Framework .............................................................................................39 Figure 5: Beginning and Ending of Culture Shock Period.......................................................57

Tables
Table 1: Demographics.............................................................................................................48 Table 2: Size categories of companies .....................................................................................50 Table 3: Main source of support...............................................................................................60 Table 4: Factors that influence the various aspects of adjustment ...........................................64 Table 5: Identification with country vs. adjustment .................................................................65 Table 6: Socialization vs. adjustment .......................................................................................65 Table 7: Loyalty to company vs. adjustment............................................................................65 Table 8: Selection criteria.........................................................................................................70 Table 9: Reasons for lack of training .......................................................................................72 Table 10: Corporate career development activities ..................................................................85 Table 11: Repatriation policy ...................................................................................................87 Table 12: Use of new skills ......................................................................................................91 Table 13: Motivation to go abroad ...........................................................................................96 Table 14: Things they would do differently .............................................................................97

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Abbreviations
Ave CCT cf. CH Dr. e.g. etc. HCN HR HRM ID i.e. IHRM IOP Avenue Cross-cultural training compare Confoederatio Helvetica (Switzerland) Doctor for example et cetera Host Country National Human Resources Human Resource Management Identification that is International Human Resource Management “Institut für Organisation und Personal” (Institute for Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management) KPMG lic.rer.pol. MNC PCN pg. POS Prof. SLT TCN UCT USA U.S. UW VP WA Klynveld Peat Marwick Goerdeler Licentiata rerum politicarum Multinational Company Parent Country National page Perceived Organizational Support Professor Social Learning Theory Third Country National U-Curve Theory (of Adjustment) United States of America United States University of Washington Vice President Washington

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1

Introduction
“I think there’s just some incredible things that we could learn from other people’s cultures.”2

1.1 Introduction to International Human Resource Management and Expatriation, Problem to be Examined
The development of the modern multinational companies (MNCs) as we know them today can be traced back to the post World War II-period. Some may have started as early as in the late 19th century, but the real growth has taken place since the late 1940s. The international expansion of previously domestic companies also changed the field of human resource (HR) management. Skilled people were needed to help building up foreign subsidiaries, staffing included the recruitment of employees with different cultural and national backgrounds, and HR managers of modern multinational firms find themselves in a highly international setting. In the early 1980s, researchers became interested in the fields of international HR management and expatriation (cf. Evans/Pucik/Barsoux 2002: 14 - 16). As previous empirical studies have shown, there is still a lot to be improved regarding the management of expatriates, and many former expatriates leave their companies within a short period of their return to headquarters. The present paper will show the current situation and the improvements that have been made to date in this important area of HR management as well as develop some recommendations for modern HR managers of international companies. The following section shows how HR management changes when becoming international. A very good overview on the topic is given by Dowling/Welch/Schuler (1999).

1.1.1

International Human Resource Management (IHRM)

Traditional HR management contains several functions, including: HR planning; staffing; performance management; training & development; compensation & benefits; and labor relations (cf. Dowling/Welch/Schuler 1999: 2).

2

An American expatriate after returning from an overseas assignment.

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International HR management can be described as consisting of the following three dimensions: HR functions (see above), country categories (e.g. company headquarters, subsidiary locations, and other countries that may be the source of labor or finance), and types of employees. Figure 1 shows a graphical model of the three dimensions of IHRM:

HR FUNCTIONS

Other Home Host Country Nationals - HCNs Parent Country Nationals - PCNs Third Country Nationals - TCNs
TYPES OF EMPLOYEES Figure 1: Model of International HRM3

Host
COUNTRIES

The main difference between domestic and international HR management is the complexity of operating in different countries and employing different national categories of workers. The basic HR functions are essentially the same, no matter if the firm is operating in a purely domestic or an international context (cf. Dowling/Welch/Schuler 1999: 4). The main factors that this complexity can be attributed to are the following: More HR activities: Although the basic HR functions remain the same, there are several additional activities that would not be necessary in the domestic context, including international taxation, administrative services for expatriates, international relocation, host-government relations, and language translation services. The function “training & development” now includes cross-cultural training, and compensation and benefits consist of special expatriate compensation packages (e.g. hardship compensation, expatriate premium, compensation for the loss of the spouse’s income, and so forth). Performance management has to give special consideration to the circumstances of the specific inter-

3

Adapted from Dowling/Welch/Schuler (1999: 3)

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national assignment, while labor relations are of course more complex and complicated when transferred to an international environment. The need for a broader perspective: Programs must be designed and administered for several national groups of employees. Preferential treatment of PCNs (as opposed to HCNs and TCNs) should be avoided. More involvement in employees’ personal lives: The HR department has to get involved in issues such as housing arrangements, health care, banking, home visits, school education of employees’ children, and so forth. HR needs to have information about the employees’ personal lives in order to provide the appropriate support. This is not necessary in a domestic environment. Changes in emphasis as the workforce mix of PCNs and HCNs varies: Over time, the need for PCNs and TCNs declines as more trained locals become available. HR must dedicate more time and effort to activities such as local staff selection instead of expatriate management. Risk exposure: The consequences of a failed international assignment are more severe than in domestic business.4 If employees are sent to countries with instable political environments, topics such as terrorism and emergency evacuation procedures may become relevant. More external influences: IHRM is influenced by factors including the type of government, the state of the economy, and the generally accepted practices of doing business in each of the host countries (cf. Dowling/Welch/Schuler 1999: 7 - 10). There are several factors that can moderate — either diminish or accentuate — differences between domestic and international HR management (cf. Dowling/Welch/Schuler 1999: 10 - 19). One of these factors is the cultural environment, which affects our values, attitudes, and behaviors. Cultural differences can create problems for people who actually have to live and work in another country, and often those people experience culture shock.5 Another factor is the importance of cultural awareness. Culturally insensitive attitudes and behaviors — originating from beliefs like “what works at home will work here” or “the way things are done in my country is the best way” — are often the cause for international business failures. An awareness of cultural differences definitely helps the HR manager as well as the individual assignee to make the international assignment a successful one. The third factor of influ-

4 5

For more information on failure rates and reasons for failure, see sections 2.6.1 and 2.6.3 below. For more information on the phenomenon of culture shock, see section 2.4.1 below.

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ence is the type of industry. Patterns of international competition are not the same among different sectors of industry, as certain industries are more protected against foreign competitors than others (e.g. due to higher import duties or stricter regulations). Therefore the HR department can be either domestic in structure and orientation, or it may have to deliver the international support required by the primary activities of the firm (i.e. procurement, production, marketing, and so forth.). The reliance of the multinational on the home-country domestic market is another factor that moderates differences between domestic and international HR management. Among the top ten multinational companies in the world6 are four Swiss firms and no American one. This is because the size of the domestic market is much smaller for the Swiss firm than for its American counterpart, and the Swiss firm has to rely far more on international markets. The last of these moderating factors refers to the attitudes of senior management to international operations. If senior management does not have a strong international orientation, there tends to be a focus on domestic issues. Managers may assume that HRM practices are easily transferable to international contexts. This failure to recognize differences in managing human resources frequently results in major difficulties in international business operations. International HR management is about employing people from different countries who may work in places other than their home countries. It involves a great deal of balancing between culturally diverse business environments. The main aspect of IHRM is undoubtedly the management of expatriates, which will be further explained in the next section.

1.1.2

Expatriation

1.1.2.1

Definition

It is critical for world class MNCs to develop a new type of cosmopolitan managers. A cosmopolitan basically needs three intangible assets: concepts, competence, and connections. In order to become a cosmopolitan, an employee may be sent on an international assignment — i.e. as a business expatriate — where these three assets can be further developed (cf. Tung 1998: 125).

6

i.e. companies with large amounts of foreign assets, sales, and employment (this information originates from the so-called “index of transnationality”)

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Expatriates can be defined as “employees who are sent from a parent company to live and work in another country for a period ranging from two to several years” (Caligiuri 2000a: 62) or as “individuals who can function effectively and efficiently in a foreign environment” (Tung 1981: 68). They are frequently described as being internationally mobile (cf. Selmer 2002c: 72, and others), while Yavas/Bodur (1999: 261) compare expatriates with ambassadors or corporate representatives. They are very important for MNCs, and there is still an increase in the use of business expats, as will be seen in the next section.

1.1.2.2

Increasing Importance of Business Expatriates

There are several reasons why MNCs should send some of their best managers abroad. Some companies place a strategic importance on global assignments, and expatriates are usually appointed for high-level negotiation, management of foreign subsidiaries, development of new markets abroad (cf. Caligiuri 2000a: 62), joint venture negotiations, or technology transfer (cf. Caligiuri 2000: 68). As Feldman/Thomas (1992: 271) noted a decade ago, international job assignments have been increasingly used since the early 1970s for a variety of organizational purposes, such as solving staffing shortages, exerting control in overseas subsidiaries, or developing management talent. Today, there is still a high demand for business expatriates, as new markets are being explored in some parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Parent country employees are also sent to well-established subsidiaries in order to develop a culturally sensitive cadre of high-level managers who are able to think globally and understand business practices as they are conducted in all corners of the world. Sometimes, third country nationals are assigned to overseas positions as well, but the present paper focuses on the more narrow definition of parent country expatriates which are sent on assignments by the headquarter of a multinational firm.

1.1.2.3

Facts about Expatriates

This section is intended to give an idea of the order of magnitude associated with expatriation. In the United States, the number of expatriate assignments has doubled from 1991 to 1993 and is still growing (cf. Caligiuri 2000a: 62). Peterson/Napier/Shul-Shim (1996: 549) conducted an empirical study among British, German, American, and Japanese MNCs and found that the expatriate employment usually amounts to one to two percent of the company’s total workforce.

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As regards the typical length of an assignment, this depends on the company’s parent country. For American and British firms, the average international assignment lasts two to four years, and for German and Japanese firms it is three to eight years (cf. Peterson/Napier/Shul-Shim 1996: 549). While still the overwhelming majority of expatriates are male, there is a slow but steady increase in the use of women in international assignments. The percentage increased from three percent in the early 1980s to eleven percent in the early nineties (cf. Tung 1998: 127), and this number does not appear to have changed much during the last decade. Women expatriates as a group are approximately ten years younger than their male colleagues, and they usually are in more junior management positions. They are also less likely to be married and hardly ever have children (cf. Forster 1997: 417 - 418). What are the characteristics of a typical business expatriate? The mean age lies somewhere between 40 and 45 years (cf. Feldman/Thomas 1992: 278, Yavas/Bodur 1999a: 269, Selmer 2001b: 11). The vast majority of expatriates are male, with percentages ranging from 88 percent (cf. Selmer 2001b: 11) to 97 percent (cf. Feldman/Thomas 1992: 278). As Peterson/Napier/Shul-Shim (1996: 549) noted, only one out of their sampled 29 firms had more than ten women on expatriate status. Most of the expatriates are married, the percentage ranging between 52 percent (cf. Yavas/Bodur 1999a: 269) and 88 percent (cf. Riusala/Suutari 2000: 84). Seventy percent of the expatriates are members of dual-career couples, i.e. married to a partner with a career of his or her own (cf. Harvey 1997: 627). Another common characteristic shared by more than half of the business expatriates is a college education (cf. Feldman/Thomas 1992: 278, Yavas/Bodur 1999a: 269).7

1.1.3

The Importance of Cultural Differences

Many MNCs make use of parent country managers in their overseas subsidiaries. That does not imply, however, that their managerial practices would be the most effective ones. International managers are required to be flexible and able to adapt their managerial practices to different nationalities and cultures. The rules of good business in the home country may be quite different from business practices in other countries, and leadership styles that are effective in one culture may even have negative consequences in another cultural context (cf. Selmer 2001a: 50). For this reason, it is critical for international business managers to be aware of

7

All these numbers were taken from individual study samples. Since the figures appear to be quite constant among different study settings and national groups of expatriates, they can be considered to be universally representative.

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cultural differences among countries of operation. A successful expatriate management includes: the selection of culturally sensitive candidates with the competencies necessary to successfully adjust to a foreign culture; the cross-cultural training and preparation of these candidates; support during the difficult period of adjustment; a performance appraisal system that takes into account the specific cultural context of the assignment; and a supportive repatriation program that helps the returning expatriates to cope with the reverse culture shock occurring when returning to the home country.

1.2 Objective of this Paper, Methodology
The main objective of this paper is to develop some recommendations and guidelines as to how a successful expatriate process ought to be designed. The focus lies on the expatriates’ views and attitudes toward their assignments. In order to achieve this goal, two principal steps are taken: The first step includes a thorough and systematic overview on the existing literature on expatriate management. Since there is a vast amount of publications written on that topic, the author of this paper concentrates on empirical studies that were carried out with the expatriates themselves, as opposed to surveys sent to, and interviews conducted with, the HR representatives of MNCs. Apart from showing the results of previously conducted empirical studies, the literature review also contains recommendations on how to successfully manage certain aspects of the expatriation and repatriation processes,8 as well as a conceptual framework for expatriate management. The relevant literature was found by using computer-based databases and the internet. It is not the purpose of the present paper to show a complete and quantitative analysis of all the existing literature, but to give an overview on topics that seem important from the author’s point of view. The second step then will be an empirical study carried out in the U.S. Pacific Northwest among recently returned expatriates working for American MNCs. The aim of this study is to gain insight into the opinions, views, and attitudes of the expatriates and to learn how they feel toward their companies and the way they are supported — or not — by the companies sending them on overseas assignments. The exact research questions will be presented in section 3.4. The author of the present paper chose not to interview the HR executives as well, but

8

These recommendations were developed by other authors and are based on the findings of their own empirical studies.

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will concentrate solely on the expatriates’ views. The study consists of qualitative, semistructured interviews. Whenever possible, the interviews are carried out face-to-face, in cases where the interview partner is too far away from Seattle, a telephone discussion is considered the best option. The results of this empirical study are then compared to those of previously conducted research in the same area.

1.3 Boundaries
Research aspects that will not be included in this paper are: international tax issues in connection with expatriates; compensation & benefits and other monetary aspects; detailed descriptions of appropriate training programs; and comparisons between various groups of expatriates, e.g. Americans vs. Europeans. The purpose of the present licentiate thesis is rather to gain an overall impression on the current situation regarding the management of expatriates in the Pacific Northwest and to make general recommendations for improvement, instead of concentrating on detailed aspects regarding the financing of such assignments or the design of individual training programs.

1.4 State of the Research on Expatriation, Other Lines of Research
The earliest contributions on expatriate management were published in the late 1960s and 1970s, and most of the early literature focuses on the company perspective. A lot has been written on the adjustment process — especially since the publication of the seminal work by Mendenhall/Oddou in 1985 — as well as on cross-cultural training and the selection procedures (see, for example, Tung 1981, Osman-Gani 2000, Harvey 1997, Forster 2000, Caligiuri 2000a). Both the earlier and more recent publications consist mainly of quantitative surveys, although in recent years there have been some qualitative studies focusing on the individual expatriates (see, for example, O’Sullivan/Appelbaum/Abikhzer 2002, Welch 1994), and since the mid-1990s there has been an increase in publications on the aspect of repatriation (see, for example, Vermond 2001, Solomon 2001, Hurn 1999). Women and the problems associated with dual-career couples are also among the more recent topics of interest to researchers (see, for example, Harvey 1997, Latta 1999).

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Expatriate management is not an isolated scientific field, but is linked to other lines of research, including: Human resource management: The basic functions remain the same. Psychology (e.g. satisfaction with the expatriate experience) and sociology (e.g. the adjustment process and the underlying social learning theory). International economics: Why should companies expand into foreign markets in the first place? International law (e.g. labor relations in foreign countries, human rights, employment laws, insurance regulations, the rules of the World Trade Organization, immigration and visa policies, and so forth). Organizational behavior: How is the multinational company organized? Which role does the HR department play in the management of expatriates? How are the expatriate managers integrated into the entire organization?

1.5 Structure of this Paper
After the introductory chapter, Chapter Two will provide an overview on the existing literature regarding expatriation. On the one hand, results from previously conducted empirical studies are presented, while on the other hand, recommendations are discussed for improving certain aspects of the expatriate process. Chapter Three describes the methodology for the empirical part of the present thesis, explaining why a qualitative approach was chosen and how the sample was selected. In Chapter Four, the results of the author’s own empirical study will be presented. Chapter Five finally develops some guidelines and recommendations for practitioners (i.e. international HR managers and the individual expatriates), based on both the literature review and the results of the interviews conducted here in the Pacific Northwest.

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2

Literature Review

2.1 Introduction
The preparatory work undertaken in the initial stages of any empirical research usually consists of a review of the literature and existing studies on the topic of interest (cf. Hakim 2000: 21). Therefore, at the beginning of this project, the objective was to find a large number of previous studies on the expatriate process. The focus of this literature research was interviews conducted with, or mail surveys sent to, the expatriates themselves, as opposed to the HR managers. Another objective was to find texts on “best practices”, giving recommendations to the companies on how the expatriate process should be managed. In order to find the relevant literature, the online database “ABI/INFORM Global” was used, besides suggestions from Prof. Richard Peterson for further articles and books, and a table provided by Prof. Richard Peterson and Rebecca Portnoy, giving an overview on some of the existing studies. A large part of the early research on expatriate management though concentrated on the perspectives of HR managers. There were almost 400 English-language publications on the topic of expatriate management published between 1962 and 1985, but only 17 of them focused on the expatriates themselves.9 Besides, prior research was mainly based on survey data, as opposed to qualitative interviews and case studies. There were only a few papers on expatriation written before the late 1970s. Before that time, there was some research on Peace Corps volunteers and foreign exchange students (cf. Black/Mendenhall/Oddou 1991: 291). The results of the literature review are discussed below. The author decided to divide them into six major parts: the selection procedure; cross-cultural training and preparation; the adjustment process and its underlying theory; cross-cultural competencies necessary for a successful expatriate assignment; information on performance, success, and failure of international assignments; and the process of repatriation. This categorization seems to make sense from the author’s viewpoint, since a large enough quantity of previous research can be found for each of these six points, and they all seem to be equally important. At the end of this chapter, a conceptual framework will be introduced, which serves as a basis for the construction of the interview guideline (see Chapter 3).

9

These numbers were gained from the database “Reader’s Guide Periodical Literature” by Prof. Peterson.

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2.2 The Selection Procedure
Before somebody can be sent on an expatriate assignment, the appropriate person for this task has to be selected. The success of the international assignment depends to a large extent on the expatriate’s person, his or her leadership style, ability to perform the task, communication and relationship skills, cultural sensitivity, and so forth. If the wrong person is selected, a lot of damage can be done both to the company and to the individual’s career. The majority of the previously conducted studies in this area focused on the information given by HR representatives though, not by the expatriates.

2.2.1

The Empirical Findings of Previous Studies

As several empirical studies have shown, the main selection criteria used by MNCs is the technical expertise of the candidate (see, for example, Welch 1994, Mendenhall/Oddou 1985, Halcrow 1999, Tung 1981, Tung 1982, Peterson/Napier/Shul-Shim 2000). Other personality characteristics are often disregarded, although their importance for the success of the assignment is undisputed. Some of the seminal work on the selection procedure was written by Rosalie Tung in the early 1980s. She did not consult the expatriates themselves though, but sent questionnaires to the vice presidents of foreign operations. Her studies showed that some psychological tests were administered to determine the relational abilities of the expatriate-tobe, though these tests were more frequently applied by Western European MNCs than by U.S. companies. She also found out that the multinationals were becoming increasingly aware of the fact that spouses were a crucial determinant of the expatriate’s success. Therefore, for management-type positions, 40 to 50 percent of the U.S. and European companies conducted interviews not only with the expatriate candidate but also with the spouse (cf. Tung 1982). Welch (1994) conducted four in-depth case studies in Australian MNCs in order to find out what factors were involved in the management of expatriates. According to her study, the selection process is one of the four most important factors.10 With regard to the selection criteria, it was shown that mainly technical skills and previous work experience were considered by the Australian MNCs examined in her study. A reason for the wide disregard of other criteria is the difficulty related to the generation of reliable and valid predictors of expatriate success. Although the companies are conscious that the ability to adjust to the foreign culture and other socio-cultural skills are important determinants of success, those characteristics are not

10

The other three are training & development, compensation, and repatriation.

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easy to measure. In most cases, the cross-cultural ability of the future expatriate is simply assessed based on the superior’s knowledge of the person, rather than the use of psychological tests (cf. Welch 1994: 146). Caligiuri/Di Santo (2001) sent surveys to expatriates employed by U.S.-based companies in order to determine which of the previously identified “global competencies” can be developed through global assignments. Those competencies are: the ability to transact business in another country; the ability to change leadership style; knowledge of professional contacts worldwide; knowledge of the company’s worldwide business structure; knowledge of international business issues; flexibility; openness; and a low degree of ethnocentrism (cf. Caligiuri/Di Santo 2001: 32). 11 The result of their study was that “[..] certain personality characteristics, while desirable for global leadership, cannot be developed through global assignments” (Caligiuri/Di Santo 2001: 33), therefore the person with the right personality characteristics has to be selected for the assignment. What conclusions can be drawn from these results? And what recommendations can be given to practitioners with regard to the selection of expatriate candidates?

2.2.2

Recommendations

The main message of Tung’s contingency approach that was developed in the early eighties is that, depending on the country of assignment and the task, the focus in the selection procedure should vary. There is no single selection criterion that can be applied in each and every case (cf. Tung 1981). She groups the factors of success into four general areas: Technical competence on the job: This factor should clearly be considered in the selection of personnel for overseas postings. Personality traits or relational abilities: The ability to relate to, live with and work among people with different value systems, customs, and ways of conducting business must also be included in the selection process. Environmental variables concerning the country of assignment: The person selected for the overseas posting must be capable of understanding the governmental, economic, and cultural systems in the foreign country and of operating within them.

11

See also section 2.5 in this chapter

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Family situation: The ability of the expatriate’s family to adjust to living in a foreign environment is a very critical factor and must not be forgotten (cf. Tung 1981: 69). One year later, Tung strongly advocated that multinational companies ought to adopt more rigorous procedures in the area of selection and training. Her rather discouraging recommendation for U.S. companies, given their relatively high failure rate, is to consider the use of host country nationals instead of parent country expatriates (cf. Tung 1982). An early paper written by Mendenhall/Oddou describes the expatriate acculturation as a multidimensional process, consisting of the following four dimensions: self-oriented, othersoriented, perceptual, and cultural toughness dimension.12 The authors suggest that, therefore, the selection procedure ought to be multidimensional too. “The expatriate selection process should focus on the evaluation of the applicant’s strengths and weaknesses in the dimensions of expatriate acculturation […]” (Mendenhall/Oddou 1985: 44).13 This general finding is supported by many authors, e.g. by Jan Selmer (1998), as he says that MNCs should be using as many as possible of the potential predictors of expatriate success in the selection procedure, instead of concentrating on one criterion only. A practical implication of the findings of Caliguri/Di Santo for the selection process is that since personality characteristics are relatively unchangeable, selection on the basis of personality is very important. MNCs should “[…] identify those global leadership candidates with the requisite personality characteristics […]” (Caligiuri/Di Santo 2001: 34). The candidates have to be predisposed to global leadership in the first place. A recent paper written by Leiba O’Sullivan/Appelbaum/Abikhzer (2002) is aimed at providing an overview of the recommended “best practices” in connection with the expatriation process. As regards the selection of expatriate candidates, the authors suggest that, during the recruitment process, information on the following topics is to be given to the candidates: career development, political conditions in the country of assignment, quality of living conditions, difficulty of spousal adjustment, and length of assignment. The best way of doing that would be to give the candidate — and also the spouse — a realistic job preview. They further suggest the use of structured interviews, with a panel of several raters involved, as well as the application of tests focusing on the “big five” personality characteristics, which are: extraver-

12 13

See section 2.4.1 below. For more detailed information on the multidimensionality of the adjustment process, see section 2.4 in this chapter.

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sion, emotional stability, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness to experience (cf. Leiba O’Sullivan/Appelbaum/Abikhzer 2002: 80). Caligiuri (2000) supports the fact that these “big five” characteristics all have some predictive value concerning the success of an expatriate assignment and should therefore be included in the selection procedure. These five personality traits are universal, so they are valid in every context, situation, and environment, no matter which country the expatriate is from or where he or she is assigned to. The problem associated with the application of the “big five” characteristics is of course the difficulty of measuring these rather subjective personality traits. Finally, a list of selection criteria is provided by Forster (2000: 63). His suggestions include: technical skills, empathy, managerial skills, sense of mission, political awareness, language skills, cultural sensitivity, ability to work with local nationals, good judgment, creativity, responsibility, alertness, initiative, self-confidence, willingness to change, openness, flexibility, tolerance, optimism, independence, good communication skills, initiative, and intelligence. So, there are many recommendations on how to properly select the right candidate for an international assignment. After the person is selected, a lot can be improved by providing him or her with the right kind of training, as can be seen in the following section.

2.3 Cross-Cultural Training, Preparation for the Assignment
Many expatriates are sent to countries with totally different cultures, compared to their home countries, and they need to be prepared in some way for the differences awaiting them. The most common thing to learn about a foreign country is the language of course, but there is more an expatriate needs to know. For example, how are people conducting business in that country? What are the most important differences in behavior, communication, and so forth? What must be avoided in order not to offend or insult the host country nationals? The company sending the expatriate on his or her foreign posting can do a lot to help the individual getting prepared for whatever culture shock there might be by providing their employees with appropriate cross-cultural training. In recent years, a new source of information for potential expatriates has been discovered: the internet. Pages such as http://www.escapeartist.com/global/reference.htm, for instance, include a large collection of practical information concerning country background, online dictionaries, list of embassies, tips on how to survive in a foreign culture, and much more.

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2.3.1

The Empirical Findings of Previous Studies

In the early eighties, cross-cultural training (CCT) was not very widespread among multinational companies. Tung (1981: 76) for example stated that only 32 percent of the U.S. companies provided some international training for their expatriates. More than a decade later, Welch (1994) detected an increasing general awareness among practitioners of the importance of training for foreign assignments. The four Australian companies in her field study all offered some sort of cultural awareness training, two of them also facilitated a look and see visit prior to the assignment. A survey conducted by Harvey a few years later in America showed that the expatriates did not feel their company provided adequate training or social support during the international assignment (cf. Harvey 1997). This study focused solely on dual-career couples, but its conclusion can probably be generalized, since the majority of expatriates are married, and many of the spouses have their own jobs. Harvey’s findings are also supported by a quantitative study carried out by Rosalie Tung in 1998. The goal of her study was to get to know the attitudes of the American expatriates toward their international assignments. One of the main statements of her paper is that many expatriates felt that their company did not provide them with a realistic job preview of what to expect in the foreign country and were unhappy with the CCT provided by their employer (cf. Tung 1998). In 2000, Osman-Gani carried out an empirical study on cross-cultural training and development of international business people, which focused on expatriates from five different countries currently working in Asia. Multinational companies all over the world are now becoming increasingly conscious of the importance of international HR development and its main component, CCT. In earlier years, little attention was given to this very important aspect of expatriate management. “[T]he fundamental reason for the lack of such training seems to be the assumption that good management is good worldwide” (Osman-Gani 2000: 213). Now, expatriate training is becoming more and more customary in many organizations, but there still remain certain doubts concerning its effectiveness. The one thing that can be said for certain is that there is no single training method which is appropriate for all situations, persons, tasks, and countries of assignment. The cross-cultural preparation of expatriates for their assignments is one of the main topics of interest of Jan Selmer. He conducted a large number of empirical studies in that field, by means of sending mail surveys to expatriates currently working in China and/or Hong Kong. In a recent paper, he stated that there is still a notorious lack of CCT for business expatriates

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sent to China (cf. Selmer 2001a). This is not only true for China, but “[…] business expatriates are regularly assigned to all parts of the world without any cross-cultural training at all” (Selmer 2001a: 50). According to Peterson/Napier/Shul-Shim (2000: 163) who compared Anglo-Saxon MNCs to their German and Japanese counterparts, the American and British companies are doing relatively poorly as regards early identification and pre-departure training of expatriates. Although there appear to be some improvements in the field of training during recent years, the situation is still far from being satisfying. A possible explanation for this is that the MNCs do not properly assess the actual training needs of their expatriates. This assumption is confirmed by one of the many articles written by Selmer on the topic of CCT (cf. Selmer 2000). There are several reasons why some MNCs still do not offer any training at all, e.g. doubted effectiveness of such training, lack of time, and the temporary nature of some international assignments. Selmer, who is in principle a clear supporter of the idea of cross-cultural training, states in a recent article that, unfortunately, there is no positive association between expatriate CCT and success of the assignment (cf. Selmer 2002c). As in the previous chapter, there are a few recommendations in the area of CCT that can be given to HR managers.

2.3.2

Recommendations

More than 20 years ago, Tung developed her contingency framework for the selection and training of expatriates. She differentiates between four categories of overseas job assignments: the chief executive officer, the structure reproducer whose job is to establish functional departments, the troubleshooter who solves specific operational problems, and the regular rank-and-file member (cf. Tung 1981: 69). Depending on the exact nature of the overseas assignment, the person selected for the task, and the country of assignment, another type of training program is appropriate. According to Tung (1982: 70 - 71), there are five main categories of cross-cultural training: Area studies programs: designed to provide the trainee with factual information about a particular country’s history, geography, and so forth; Culture assimilator: designed to assist members of one culture to interact and adjust successfully with members of another country; Language training;

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Sensitivity training: designed to develop a flexibility in the trainee’s attitudes and help the individual to come to terms with unfamiliar modes of behavior and value systems; Field experiences: The candidate is sent to the country of assignment and is exposed to encounters with people from that culture. These categories can of course be combined to a training program suitable for the individual expatriate. The basic statement of Tung’s contingency framework is that “[…] given the differences in degrees of contact required with the local culture, varying durations of stay in the foreign country, and the varying degrees of differences between home and other foreign cultures, there is […] no one training program that should be used regardless of the task and environment” (Tung 1982: 70). A study by Peterson/Napier/Shul-Shim (2000: 159) which, amongst other things, was aimed at finding some strengths and weaknesses of expatriate management programs of MNCs across four countries found that one of the common weaknesses is the failure of some MNCs to tailor their programs to individual expatriate needs. A few years later, Mendenhall/Oddou (1985) wrote their article about the multidimensionality of the expatriate acculturation process. The main implication is that both the selection and the training procedures should be multidimensional too. For example, technical expertise is one dimension; the ability to interact with people from different cultural backgrounds is another dimension, and so forth. Training is needed in all dimensions. A more recent contribution by Tung (1998) states that the higher the management level, the longer it takes for the expatriate to adjust and feel comfortable in the host country. Senior management jobs usually require more contacts with host country nationals, and the duration of the assignment is typically longer. Therefore, for those who fill positions at senior management levels, more rigorous selection criteria should be applied, and more comprehensive training programs should be provided (cf. Tung 1998: 132). Osman-Gani recommends that both the content and the delivery mode of CCT programs should be chosen according to the nationality of the individual expatriate, instead of merely designing and delivering one set of international training program for all nationals (cf. Osman-Gani 2000: 232). O’Sullivan/Appelbaum/Abikhzer (2002: 80), in their search for “best practices”, concluded that every training program should begin with a needs assessment phase. They strongly advocate that training should take place in a formal manner and be rather rigorous. Another recommendation that can be found in the Peterson/Napier/Shul-Shim article (2000: 160) is that MNCs should provide more language training before the overseas assignment. This may be especially important for American expatriates since English is spoken and understood almost

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in every country of the world, and some American expats might not be aware of the importance of foreign language skills. So far, we have only looked at the training of the business expatriate himself. An interesting article written by Vance/Paderon (1993) suggests that not only the expatriate be trained, but also the host country workforce. It might help to prepare the subordinates for the most striking cultural differences in the behavior of their new superior, in order for them to understand better how their new manager thinks and what his intentions are. The main conclusion that can be drawn from all those papers is clearly that there is no one “best” training suited for all situations and individuals, but that many elements have to be considered when designing an appropriate CCT program. One also has to bear in mind that, as good as the training programs may be, they can accomplish no miracles. If a candidate is not willing to work abroad, then no training program will be able to change this basic attitude (cf. Tung 1981: 72). Once the proper candidate is selected, given some pre-assignment training, and arrived in the country of assignment, the difficult period of adjustment begins.

2.4 The Adjustment Process
The adjustment process is essentially the only aspect of the expatriate management that is really based on a highly theoretical background. The seminal work on this topic was written by Black, Mendenhall, and Oddou (see, for example, Black/Mendenhall/Oddou 1991, Black/Mendenhall 1991, Mendenhall/Oddou 1985). This part of the expatriate management process is very important and critical for the success of the assignment, because after an employee is sent to a foreign posting, it takes some time for him or her to learn about the country’s business and social norms before the individual can actually become productive at the job. Of course, every company seeks to keep this adjustment period as short as possible, so that the expatriate can start working productively soon after he or she arrives in the host country. In order to know how to facilitate the adjustment process, it is important to understand the underlying theory.

2.4.1

The Underlying Theory

It might be helpful to explain first what is meant by such terms as “culture” or “culture shock”. Culture has to do with how a person thinks, feels, and reacts. It cannot only be described in words and sentences, but is mainly acquired and transmitted within the group by

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symbols. The essential core of culture can be described as traditional ideas and their attached values (cf. McEvoy/Parker 1995: 97). Schell/Solomon (1997: 26) have developed a model consisting of nine cultural dimensions: relationships, attitude towards time, communication, hierarchy, status attainment, space,14 group dependence, diversity receptivity,15 and change tolerance. All these dimensions vary across cultures. Most people are able to cope very well in the culture of their home country, no matter how complex or complicated it might seem to others. When a person moves to another country, however, what matters most is not the complexity of the new culture, but rather the cultural toughness (i.e. cultural novelty or distance, compared to the culture of the home country). If there is a high degree of cultural novelty, many expatriates experience a phenomenon called culture shock, which “[…] is precipitated by the anxiety that results from losing all our familiar signs and symbols of social intercourse” (McEvoy/Parker 1995: 98). The following symptoms are frequently associated with culture shock: “excessive preoccupation with cleanliness of drinking water, food, and surroundings, concerns over minor aches and pains, excessive anger over delays and other relatively minor frustrations, fear of being cheated or robbed, reluctance to learn the host-country language, feeling of hopelessness” etc. (McEvoy/Parker 1995: 98). The expatriate intercultural adjustment can then be defined as “the process by which overseas employees become comfortable with — or acculturated to — the host-country culture” or the “degree of psychological comfort with various aspects of a host country” (McEvoy/Parker 1995: 98). In many publications on cross-cultural adjustment, the authors point out the distinction between socio-cultural and psychological adjustment. This distinction was originally made by Searle, Ward and Kennedy in the early nineties (e.g. Searle/Ward 1990; Ward/Kennedy 1992; Ward/Searle 1991), and was afterwards used by many other authors. Those two concepts are inter-related, but they are concerned with different aspects of adjustment. While psychological adjustment deals with the more subjective side of the adjustment process, or the mood states, socio-cultural adjustment relates to the ability to “fit in” and can be measured by the

14

“Status Attainment” measures the importance of personal achievement and accomplishment to an overall sense of well-being. “Space” views how individuals in societies use space to define themselves, including spatial distances used when speaking, and the amount of space needed for comfort in business and living environments. 15 “Diversity Receptivity” defines how roles, power, and authority are associated which each gender. It also measures the attitude towards people of different race, religion, national origin, and so forth.

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amount of difficulty experienced in the management of everyday situations in the host culture (cf. Ward/Kennedy 1996). When writing about the adjustment process, it is important to refer to expatriate adjustment as a multidimensional concept, not as a unidimensional one. According to Black (1988) and Black and Stephens (1989), socio-cultural adjustment consists of at least three facets: work adjustment, adjustment to interaction with host country nationals, and adjustment to the general non-work environment in the host country. These three categories are going to be used throughout the remaining part of this thesis because they are considered comprehensible enough to be used in the interviews. There are also other possibilities of categorizing the adjustment dimensions, but these might be a bit more difficult for the interviewees to understand, and they would unnecessarily complicate the empirical study. In an earlier paper written by Mendenhall/Oddou (1985: 40 - 42) for example, the following four dimensions of adjustment were explained: The self-oriented dimension: It refers to the strengthening of the expatriate’s self-esteem and self-confidence. The others-oriented dimension: It is associated with an enhancement of the expatriate’s ability to interact with HCNs. Willingness to communicate is an important determinant. The perceptual dimension: It refers to the capability of understanding why foreigners behave differently, as compared to people in the home country. The expatriate needs to be able to make correct attributions about the reasons or causes of host nationals’ behavior in order to predict how they will behave toward him or her in the future. The cultural-toughness dimension: Not all countries are equally difficult to adjust to for foreigners.

2.4.1.1

The U-Curve Theory (UCT)

The theory and ideas of these three authors (Black, Mendenhall, and Oddou) are going to be discussed in more detail now. The main theory underlying the cross-cultural adjustment is the so-called “U-Curve Theory” of Adjustment (UCT). Therefore, the authors are examining the UCT from a theoretical point of view as the underlying reason for expatriate adjustment and culture shock. The goal of their study was to find out whether the UCT actually gives an accurate explanation of why many expatriates experience culture shock.

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The UCT basically describes four stages in the adjustment process, which will be illustrated in Figure 2. The following quotes were all taken from Black/Mendenhall/Oddou (1991: 226). Honeymoon stage: “[…] individuals are fascinated by the new culture and are excited about all the new and interesting ‘sights and sounds’”. Disillusionment or culture shock stage: “[…] the individual must seriously cope with living in the new culture on a day-to-day basis”. Adjustment stage: There is a “[…] gradual adaption to the new culture and learning how to behave appropriately according to the cultural norms of the host country”. Mastery stage: Finally there are only “[…] small incremental increases in the individual’s ability to function effectively in the new culture”.

Degree of Adjustment

Honeymoon Mastery

Adjustment

Culture Shock
0-2 3-4 4-6 6-9 10-12 13-24 25-36 46-48 49+

Time in Months

Figure 2: The U-Curve of Cross-Cultural Adjustment16

Figure 2 shows that the entire adjustment process, as explained by the UCT, takes about four years until the expatriate finally reaches the mastery stage where he or she finds him- or herself very well adjusted to the new culture. Since adjustment refers to learning how to cope in a new and foreign environment, it is crucial to understand how individuals learn and how the acquired knowledge is utilized. There are basically two competing sets of theories: On the one hand, there are the cognitive theories, arguing that mental processing of information is the basis for each learning process, and the appropriate behaviors are then derived from

16

Adapted from Black/Mendenhall/Oddou (1991: 227)

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that mental processing. On the other hand, the behavioral theories say that learning is determined by behavior and the positive or negative feedback associated with different sets of behaviors (cf. Black/Mendenhall/Oddou 1991: 232). Finally, there is the Social Learning Theory (SLT), which integrates both cognitive and behavioral theories. The main message of the SLT is that “[…] in addition to individuals learning based on the consequences of their actions, individuals can also learn and behave based on their observations of other people’s behavior and associated consequences and by imitating the modeled behavior” (Black/Mendenhall/Oddou 1991: 233). In order to learn from other people’s behavior, there must first be a sufficiently attractive model that is frequently available to the learner. Such a model could be a host national coworker or superior, for example. Then, the observed behavior must be encoded by the memory of the observer, either in the form of images or words. Next, the modeled behavior can be reproduced, which means simply that the newcomer tries to imitate the behavior he observed with the host nationals. There must also be sufficient incentives for observing the models, paying attention to their behaviors, and retaining, rehearsing, and finally executing the observed behaviors. The newcomer must possess sufficient self-efficacy to believe he can successfully execute the newly learned behaviors, and he must also believe that the execution of certain behaviors will lead to desired outcomes (cf. Black/Mendenhall/Oddou 1991: 234-235). After that, the authors examine in detail the theoretical explanation for the four U-curve stages, based on the SLT. They also analyze two different moderating variables that can change the shape of the U-curve or the duration of each of the four stages; these variables are anticipatory adjustment and individual differences. It is possible for individuals to make anticipatory adjustment to the new culture before they ever experience it. In order to do that, the expatriate-to-be would need sufficiently accurate information on the host culture. Sources of anticipatory adjustment could be training or previous international experience. The second set of moderating variables is the individual differences. Important individual variables that affect the duration of the adjustment phases and the shape of the U-curve are, for instance, the degree of ethnocentricity, willingness to communicate, willingness to establish relationships, and tolerance for ambiguity (cf. Black/Mendenhall/Oddou 1991: 243). The authors finally reach the conclusion that “SLT provides a theoretical explanation of why in general cross-cultural adjustment would exhibit a U-curve pattern. However, it has also been noted that various situational and individual factors can affect the pattern of adjustment” (Black/Mendenhall/Oddou 1991: 245).

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2.4.1.2

The Three Dimensions of Adjustment, and Factors of Influence

As already stated before, the socio-cultural aspect of adjustment consists of at least the following three facets. Work adjustment includes adjustment to new job responsibilities, supervision, and performance expectations (cf. McEvoy/Parker 1995: 98). Selmer defines work adjustment as the “[…] gap between the extent to which the work environment meets the needs of the individual [...] plus the gap between the degree to which the individual’s abilities meet the demand of the work role [...]” (Selmer 1996: 548). Interaction means socializing and speaking with host nationals, while general adjustment refers to housing, food, shopping, living conditions, entertainment and recreation facilities, health care facilities, and so forth (cf. McEvoy/Parker 1995: 98). The following framework was developed by Black, Mendenhall, and Oddou.

In-Country Adjustment
Individual: Individual:
Training Previous Experience

(1,2,3) Self-efficacy (1,2,3) Relation Skills (1,2,3) Perception Skills

Organization Socialization: Socialization Tactics Socialization Contents

Accurate Expectations Job: (1) Role Clarity (1) Role Discretion (1) Role Novelty (1) Role Conflict Mode of Adjustment Degree of Adjustment: 1. Work Adjustment 2. Interaction Adjustment 3. General Adjustment

Anticipatory Adjustment

Organization: Selection Mechanisms and Criteria

Organization Culture: (1) Org. Culture Novelty (1) Social Support (2,3) Logistical Help

Non-work: (2,3) Culture Novelty (1,2,3) Family-Spouse Adjustment

Figure 3: Framework of International Adjustment17

The framework shown in Figure 3 demonstrates that the adjustment process consists of two phases. Adjustment can take place either prior to the departure and/or once the expatriate is actually in the country of assignment. The principal message of the framework is that there are different antecedents to adjustment that may have different impacts on each of the three

17

Cf. Black/Mendenhall/Oddou (1991: 303)

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facets of adjustment (cf. Black/Mendenhall/Oddou 1991: 304). 18 One must also consider the fact that an expatriate can be well adjusted to one facet and poorly adjusted to others, for instance, one can be well adjusted to the new job, but not to the climate and food in the foreign country. Several papers on the topic of psychological barriers to adjustment and coping strategies were published by Jan Selmer (see, for example, Selmer 2002, Selmer 2002a, Selmer 2001). One of the two psychological barriers he examined is unwillingness to adjust. Not every expatriate willing to accept a foreign assignment is equally willing to learn about and adjust to the culture in the host country. There are many employees who accept the foreign assignment only for monetary reasons or to escape from personal problems at home and are not interested in learning new behaviors or adjusting to a host culture environment (cf. Selmer 2002: 7). The other psychological barrier he writes about is perceived inability to adjust, indicating a lack of self-confidence. These two psychological barriers affect the coping strategies employed by the expatriates in order to deal with the culture shock. Selmer distinguishes between two different types of coping strategies: some are problem focused, while others are more symptom focused. The former aim at changing the actual situation that is perceived as being the cause of the stress, and the latter simply refer to the regulation of stressful emotions — i.e. minimizing anxieties through physical or mental withdrawal from the situation or by avoiding the problem. It is possible that a person applies both kinds of coping strategies at the same time (cf. Selmer 2002a: 21-22). Several empirical studies were concerned with the question as to which factors have a positive or negative impact on expatriate adjustment. The results of these studies are explained in the next paragraph.

2.4.2

The Empirical Findings of Previous Studies

A factor that has a direct influence on adjustment is perceived organizational support, as was confirmed by a study carried out by Kraimer/Wayne/Jaworski. Perceived organizational support is defined as “the employees’ general beliefs about the extent to which their organization values their contributions and cares about their well-being” (Kraimer/Wayne/Jaworski 2001: 75). The help and support can come from either people in the home country location or the foreign subsidiary.

18

The numbers in brackets indicate the facet(s) of adjustment that are facilitated by the individual antecedents.

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Yavas/Bodur (1999, 1999a) carried out a study in Turkey by sending questionnaires to business managers of foreign firms operating in Turkey. The goal of their research was to find out which factors influence the adjustment process. Their results supported the need for predeparture cross-cultural training, which has a significantly positive relationship with work adjustment. Yavas/Bodur also discovered several personal characteristics which are positively related to adjustment, such as: skills to foster relationships with host nationals, self-efficacy, cultural openness, flexibility, adaptability, ability to recognize complexities in host cultures, realistic expectations, enjoying social interactions, empathy for others, and effectiveness at resolving conflicts. The organizational characteristics that may help in the work adjustment process are: employee-orientation of the company, open communication channels, consensus decision making, and teamwork. Another finding of their study is that previous international experience has a positive influence on interaction and work adjustment. This may not be true in all circumstances, as a study carried out by Jan Selmer (2002c) in Hong Kong found no support for this assertion. In 1999, there was a study carried out by Shaffer/Harrison/Gilley which explicitly tested the Black, Mendenhall, and Oddou model of the dimensions and determinants of adjustment.19 The method they applied was a mail survey sent to assignees employed with large U.S. companies, measuring the three facets of socio-cultural adjustment as well as the various factors of influence. The basic result of their study was a general support for the Black et al. model of 1991. Many of the direct effects proposed in that model were indeed significant predictors of adjustment. “The significance of three job-related factors (i.e. role clarity, role discretion and role novelty) highlights the importance of job design to the success of international assignments” (Shaffer/Harrison/Gilley 1999: 573). There are basically two organizational support factors, i.e. logistical support and co-worker support, which were confirmed to be positive predictors of adjustment. As to the non-work factors, culture novelty and spousal adjustment were found to have a direct effect on interaction and general adjustment. Of the individual factors, previous international experience and fluency in the host-country language were found to be positively related to the adjustment (cf. Shaffer/Harrison/Gilley 1999: 574). Jan Selmer conducted several mail surveys among Western business expatriates in Hong Kong and China concerning their adjustment. One of his studies among expatriates in Hong Kong resulted in the finding that there was no association between corporate career develop-

19

See section 2.4.1.2 above in this chapter.

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ment activities and work adjustment (cf. Selmer 2002), which seems somewhat surprising, since these activities are aimed at the expatriate’s job in particular. He also seems to overturn another theory in a recent study (Selmer 2002c), stating that, after all, previous international experience does not have such a big influence on the expatriate’s ability to function and work on a foreign assignment. Especially culturally unrelated prior international experience does not help with any aspect of expatriate adjustment, neither socio-cultural nor psychological. Only if the previous experience was in a culture similar to the Hong Kong environment — i.e. another Asian country — it might help facilitate work adjustment (cf. Selmer 2002c: 82-83). The author of the present paper did not find any other empirical study supporting these findings, therefore it might be possible that they only hold true for the Asian environment. Another of Selmer’s interests is with the coping strategies applied by expatriates. By ways of a mail survey, he found out that problem focused coping strategies were more frequently used than the symptom focused strategies (cf. Selmer 2002). He also confirmed a clear positive association between problem focused coping and both socio-cultural and psychological adjustment, as was expected (cf. Selmer 2002a). Caligiuri carried out a study recently in order to test the validity of the contact hypothesis in the expatriation context. This theory implies that the more interaction a person has with people from a given cultural group, the more positive are his or her attitudes toward those people. Can the principles of this theory be applied to the interpersonal interactions between expatriates and host nationals? Caligiuri sent mail surveys to expatriates employed by one multinational U.S.-based company and found out that greater contact with host nationals does not affect adjustment, unless the expatriates possess the personality characteristic of openness (cf. Caligiuri 2000: 74). This highlights the importance of properly selecting the right candidate for an overseas posting and examining the cross-cultural and relational abilities of the potential expatriates. Several practical implications can be learned from both the theory and the findings of previous studies, as will be discussed in section 2.4.3.

2.4.3

Recommendations

The level of expatriate adjustment can be affected by the companies in several ways. For instance, individual predictors of adjustment ought to be included in the selection process, instead of technical skills only (cf. McEvoy/Parker 1995: 111). Selmer (2002: 21 - 22) also highlights the fact that “perceived inability to adjust may indicate a lack of cross-cultural skills such as cultural empathy, intercultural communication competence, non-ethnocentrism,

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and knowledge of foreign language.” Although it might be difficult to measure some of these abilities, they do have a certain value as selection criteria, facilitating general and interaction adjustment for newcomers. Cross-cultural pre-departure training can help facilitate the adjustment process, but one must consider that quality has a much greater impact than the duration of the training. Organizations that really want to help their expatriates to adjust more quickly and easily should also provide them with accurate information about the nature of the work and the interactions involved in the overseas posting. This information needs to be made available prior to departure, and possible sources of information are returned expatriates and host country nationals. Since, in certain cases, there is a positive relationship between time spent with host nationals and the level of adjustment, organizations should consider housing policies that do not separate the expatriates from the local inhabitants (cf. McEvoy/Parker 1995: 111). Selmer (2002c: 83-84) mentions the highly positive effect that CCT has on the adjustment. Not only should expatriates receive such training once in their career, “but for each and every new foreign assignment they embark on, at least for new postings transcending a new and unfamiliar region”. The need for training is also supported in other studies (e.g. Selmer 2000). It was concluded by Shaffer/Harrison/Gilley (1999: 573) that “[…] multinational firms should place more emphasis on designing global positions such that expatriates have more clearly defined jobs and greater decision-making authority. Furthermore, greater levels of predeparture training may be necessary for expatriates expected to experience higher levels of role novelty.” This training should not only be aimed at the expatriates themselves, but also at their spouses, since spousal adjustment has a direct effect on the expatriate’s own adjustment. What can the expatriates themselves do to make their adjustment in the foreign culture a success? According to Tung (1998: 126), the most optimal form of interaction between people from different cultures is integration, i.e. preserving and combining the better elements of the host and home country cultures and creating a new whole, which is greater than the sum of the parts. The most dysfunctional mode would be marginalization, i.e. non-preservation of the own cultural norms and non-attraction to the new culture. It is necessary for a successful expatriate to possess a certain degree of openness toward other cultures, but not adapt too much to the new environment. If the assignee identifies completely with the host culture, the repatriation into the home country will become very difficult.

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Not all employees are equally predisposed for overseas assignments. Some have more difficulties in adjusting than others. The success of an assignment depends to a high degree on the cross-cultural competencies of the individual expatriate.

2.5 Cross-Cultural Competencies Necessary for a Successful Expatriate Assignment
A very interesting article on the topic of cross-cultural competencies was written by Sharon Leiba O’Sullivan (1999), and this section will mainly focus on her paper. The expatriate’s skills, knowledge, and abilities play a vital role throughout the expatriate management process. They ought to be considered in selecting the right person for the task, some of them can be improved through CCT, they definitely help to facilitate the adjustment, and they also have a strong influence on the success or failure of the international assignment. Leiba O’Sullivan emphasizes the difference between stable and dynamic competencies, implying that not all of these desirable competencies can be acquired through CCT. The potential expatriate must already possess certain stable competencies — i.e. abilities and personality traits — in order to be able to acquire the more dynamic competencies, such as knowledge and skills. Therefore these stable competencies have to be considered in the selection procedure, while the dynamic ones can be learned through appropriate training programs. She also distinguishes between three different dimensions, each of which includes some stable and some dynamic competencies.20 Among the stable competencies is, for example, the characteristic predisposition to manage emotions, i.e. the emotional stability that allows one to deal with stressful situations without getting upset. There are also the personality traits of extraversion (a willingness to develop interpersonal relationships) and agreeableness, which might be a predictor of a person’s ability to develop and maintain relationships with host country nationals. Openness to experience helps to adapt when interacting with culturally different groups; and conscientiousness refers to being capable of controlling impulses, being purposeful and determined. The dynamic competencies that may be acquired through training include various types of cultural knowledge, e.g. factual information on the country of assignment, an understanding of how this country views and values behaviors, and an awareness of contextually appropriate

20

The three dimensions are: self-maintenance, cross-cultural relationship, and perceptual dimension. A more detailed discussion of these dimensions is not considered necessary for the purpose of this paper.

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behavior. Self-efficacy refers to the confidence one has in one’s ability to perform specific behaviors and to apply one’s cultural knowledge. It is of course helpful if the expatriate also possesses sufficient knowledge of conflict-resolution strategies and skills. The terms “success” or “successful assignment” have been used several times throughout the first two chapters. The following section tries to explain what exactly is meant by these terms. How can one determine if an expatriate assignment was a success or a failure?

2.6 Performance, Success, and Failure
2.6.1 Failure Rates

The problem with expatriate failure rates is that there is virtually no agreement among academic researchers as to how high these numbers actually are. There seems to be a “persistent myth of high expatriate failure rates” which is actually rather strange, and there are two very interesting articles explaining how this myth started and where the originally correct figures were misquoted (cf. Harzing 1995, Forster 1997). The traditional definition of “failure” includes only those expatriates who returned home before their assignment contract ended because of poor work performance and/or personal problems (cf. Forster 1997: 416), but this definition may be too narrow. Harzing (1995: 458) suggests expanding this definition to expatriates who stay on their assignments but who fail to perform adequately. Unsuccessful repatriation can also be considered a failed assignment. Many citations can be found on failure rates ranging from 25 to 40 percent, or 16 to 40 percent. Where did these high figures originate? One of the very few original studies on failure rates was carried out by Tung in 1981, stating that 76 percent of the American companies had failure rates between 10 and 40 percent. If one looks at these figures more closely, one can also see that only seven percent of these companies had failure rates of more than 20 percent. For some reason or other, this high category of 10 to 40 percent was later on cited by many well-known researchers, and the myth of the high failure rates became more and more widespread. Harzing did some detective work on the origin of all these quotations and found yet another source that was frequently cited: a study by two management consultants named Misa and Fabricatore who were “[…] claiming, out of the blue, that in the glorious past (the 1960s) American expatriate failure rates were 25-40 per cent” (Harzing 1995: 468). Astonishingly, this figure, although it had no empirical evidence whatsoever, was generally and unquestioningly accepted by many researchers. It was cited in Mendenhall/Oddou (1985), and there is a

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large number of references to it via the Mendenhall/Oddou article,21 therefore it became the general opinion among American writers. Most articles, however, do not present any original data, but simply refer to other papers which refer in turn to yet other publications (cf. Harzing 1995: 470). The conclusions that can be drawn from this are that the actual failure rates are probably a lot lower than what is commonly assumed, and that European and Japanese companies generally have lower failure rates than American firms (cf. Harzing 1995: 471). According to Forster’s study (1997: 429), around eight percent of British expatriates return home early, and if a broader definition of failure is used (i.e. expatriates who experience considerable difficulties in adapting to the foreign culture), the actual failure rate might lie somewhere between eight and 28 percent.

2.6.2

Organizational Commitment

A clear indicator for a failed expatriate assignment is low organizational commitment on behalf of the employee. Organizational commitment can be defined as: a) a strong belief in, and acceptance of, the organization’s goals and values [identification]; b) a willingness to exert considerable effort on behalf of the organization [involvement]; c) and a strong desire to maintain membership in the organization [loyalty]. (cf. Mowday/Porter/Steel 1982: 27, cited in Banai/Reisel 1993: 234) The most desired pattern of allegiance, according to Black/Gergersen (1992) is a high dual allegiance, i.e. loyalty and commitment toward both the parent firm and the local operation in the host country. Many expatriates direct their loyalties too far in one direction or the other, which can result in negative consequences for both the expatriates and their companies. One wants to avoid either too high commitment to the local operation that would make coordination difficult for the home office, or an overly high commitment to the parent, which would lead to the inappropriate implementation of policies or procedures from the home office (cf. Black/Gregersen 1992: 61). Therefore, “multinational firms need managers who are highly committed to both the parent firm and the local operation and can integrate the demands and objectives of both organizations”, but unfortunately that type of manager is a “rare commodity” (cf. Black/Gregersen 1992: 62).

21

Practically every author who has contributed to the literature on expatriate management since 1986 referred to this statement (cf. Harzing 1995: 468).

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2.6.3

Reasons for Failure

A very common mistake by MNCs is the use of the “domestic equals overseas performance” equation (cf. Mendenhall/Oddou 1985: 39). Many companies believe that a manager who shows high performance in New York can do just as good a job in Prague or Tokyo. Therefore, a large number of expatriates is sent on their assignments without being predisposed for working in a foreign environment or at least given some kind of cross-cultural training. Many of the failed expatriates had very good track records at home, so why do they fail abroad? As Leiba O’Sullivan/Appelbaum/Abikhzer (2002: 79) state, premature returns from international assignments are often due to factors that are not present in domestic relocations. The main factor is culture shock and the emotional stress that usually goes with it. Tung (1981) suggests that the poor selection procedure might be a reason for the high failure rates. This may be confirmed by the fact that the most commonly used selection criterion is simply the employee’s technical expertise, and, as Teagarden/Gordon (1995: 20) note, expatriate failure is hardly ever due to the lack of technical abilities but of ineffective cross-cultural adjustment in the host country. A reason why especially the American expatriates so often fail might be the lack of foreign language fluency, as compared to other expatriates. Many U.S. companies do not provide their expatriates with language training, as opposed to European firms, for example (cf. Brewster 1995: 64). This connection is a mere supposition though, and it has not been proved by any empirical research so far. The most frequently cited reason for failure is clearly the spouse’s inability to adjust to the foreign location (see, for example, Tung 1981, Teagarden/Gordon 1995, Brewster 1995, Riusala/Suutari 2000). In many cases, this leads to the early termination of the international assignment. Nevertheless, the family situation is only very rarely given consideration in the selection procedure. There are several things MNCs could do to help their dual-career couples, including assistance in seeking a job for the spouse abroad, helping her organize a work permit, providing language and other cross-cultural training for the spouse and family, and so forth (cf. Riusala/Suutari 2000). The vast majority of expatriate failures are evidently related to cross-cultural issues, not to technical problems connected with the job itself. That shows again how important it is for companies to give due consideration to cross-cultural and relational abilities of the candidates in the selection process, to properly prepare the expatriates-to-be for living and working in a foreign culture, and to include the employee’s family in the selection and training process.

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How to determine which expatriate assignment is a success and which is a failure is not always an easy task. In order to avoid subjective assessments on success and failure, a welldesigned performance appraisal system should be used by the multinational companies.

2.6.4

Expatriate Performance Appraisal

Gregersen/Black/Hite give a very good overview on how companies should evaluate the performance of their expatriates. In a first step, the firm has to identify the strategic goals for sending employees on overseas assignments. Possible goals might include bringing a global perspective back to headquarters, coordinating subsidiaries and headquarters, transferring knowledge to the foreign locations, or the development of future global leaders (cf. Gregersen/Black/Hite 1995: 173). As to the choice of the performance criteria, they must be defined within the context of the expatriate assignment and the culture of the foreign country. The second step should be to identify the specific purpose for the appraisal. Is it designed for developmental purposes, or to determine whether the expatriate is reaching the strategic goals, to identify training needs, or simply for administrative purposes (cf. Gregersen/Black/ Hite 1995: 174)? A very important point is to consider the unique context of the expatriate performance. Many expatriates are evaluated inappropriately if they are assessed with the same performance appraisal system as their domestic counterparts. The foreign situation and the context in which the expatriate operates must be given due consideration in the assessment in order to avoid unfair treatment (cf. Gregersen/Black/Hite 1995: 174). Some thought should be given to the personality of the rater(s). Are they local nationals? Have they had any experience with expatriates and with overseas assignments? What language do they speak? What are their cultural values concerning the employee’s appraisal (cf. Gregersen/Black/Hite 1995: 175)? The authors strongly advocate the use of multiple raters in order to improve the quality of the evaluation and to avoid rater bias (cf. Gregersen/Black/Hite 1995: 180). They also suggest that the raters be close to the employee to evaluate performance effectively (cf. Gregersen/Black/Hite 1995: 184), i.e. local raters are preferred. In order for headquarter management to properly evaluate the performance of their overseas employees, there is of course a necessity for regular communication between corporate HR staff back at headquarters and the international subsidiaries. A recent paper by Peterson/Napier/Shul-Shim (2000: 159) showed that poor communication was sometimes stated as one of the weaknesses of the MNC’s expatriate management program.

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There is a last aspect which must not be forgotten. Once the employee returns to the home country, the process of expatriation is not over yet.

2.7 Repatriation
The expatriation process also includes repatriation: the employee and his family eventually have to be brought back to the home country (Not all international assignments end with a transfer home though. Some expatriates are re-assigned to another international post or even have consecutive international assignments). One of the reasons for MNCs to send employees on overseas postings is to gain a more global perspective. Therefore, the knowledge and experiences of the returning expatriates should be utilized by the firm. Unfortunately, there seems to be an inability of many firms to profitably reposition their expatriates though (cf. Baughn 1995: 215). Many of these so-called repatriates experience reverse culture shock upon coming back home. What can multinational companies do to manage the repatriation of their international employees successfully? And what did previous studies find out as regards the management of the repatriation process by multinational firms?

2.7.1

The Empirical Findings of Previous Studies

A quantitative study among Finnish expatriates working all over the world was conducted in 2000 by Riusala/Suutari. The expatriates’ main concern with regard to their future is undoubtedly the question of job arrangements upon repatriation. In particular, they wish that the specific job is clearly defined early enough before going back home, and the requirements of the new task should take into account the knowledge and experiences gathered while working abroad. The reality looks quite different though. Sixty one percent of the repatriation agreements covered in this study included a promise that the repatriate would get at least a similar level job as the one which he held before the assignment. Only five percent of the expatriates knew their exact future job in advance (cf. Riusala/Suutari 2000: 85). As regards careerrelated support by the companies, such practices were not very common in that sample of Finnish expatriates. Less than half of the respondents were provided with pre-departure career development debriefings, i.e. a discussion on the impact of the expatriate assignment on the future career. Even fewer repatriates (ten percent) had the opportunity to present new skills gained on the overseas posting and give a general feedback to the home organization. Family repatriation programs were only used in six percent of the cases in the Finnish sample (cf. Riusala/Suutari 2000: 86).

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These findings essentially match the results of Tung’s study carried out among American expats in 1998. While a vast majority of expatriates believe that a successful international assignment will have a positive impact on their subsequent career advancement, most of them are not guaranteed career advancement opportunities upon repatriation. The numbers here are even more discouraging than the ones in the Finnish sample. Sixty percent of the American expatriates were not guaranteed a position at all in the home organization, and merely one third of the respondents were promised a position at the same organizational level at which they were expatriated. Only seven percent were promised a promotion upon return (cf. Tung 1998: 129). Most of the respondents in Tung’s study were unhappy with the repatriation process (cf. Tung 1998: 137). Nevertheless, the expatriates view their overseas positions as an opportunity to acquire skills and experiences that are not available at home, even if these skills will not help them later to be promoted within their own organization. The terms “internal”22 or “boundaryless” career suggest that an international assignment may be valued for the opportunity it brings for personal development and career enhancement. It does not necessary mean that the career advancement will take place within the same company. This concept of “boundaryless careers” is beginning to take hold mainly in the U.S., and so far there are not many studies carried out among non-U.S. samples (cf. Stahl/Miller/Tung 2002: 217). A recent study carried out by Peterson/Napier/Shul-Shim (2000: 153) which focused on the expatriation practices applied by MNCs of four different countries showed that only two out the ten American MNCs in this sample guaranteed their assignees a job upon repatriation. Almost a decade prior to that, Napier/Peterson (1991: 23) found that most employees ”saw their assignment as benefiting their careers”. But it was also “fairly unusual for company officials to discuss how the overseas assignment fit into the individual’s long-term career with the company. It was even rarer that company officials would discuss possible assignments for the person on return from overseas.” The same study found that “on the whole, employees did not feel their post-overseas jobs were as attractive as those overseas. Most respondents viewed themselves as having less autonomy in the present job” (Napier/Peterson 1991: 24). Those rather bleak numbers are repeated in many other papers. Vermond for example, in her article about returning expatriates, reports that 49 percent of them leave their companies within two years of repatriation (cf. Vermond 2001: 31). 23 Very often, the expatriates’ expec-

22 23

As opposed to “external career”, which refers to the enhancement within one organization. This number was estimated by employers in a survey carried out in the U.S. Vermond did not conduct this study herself.

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tations concerning promotion are not met, the returning employees feel unappreciated by their companies, and they have to discover that their previous peers have climbed the career ladder in the meantime (cf. Vermond 2001: 32). All this leads to frustration and may cause the repatriates to leave the company. Vermond looks for reasons why companies are not treating repatriation seriously and cites a KPMG study which says that many companies do not plan repatriation a long time ahead, and some even have no plans at all. There appears to be a strong unwillingness among managers to accept that the expatriates need help, and that coming back to their office after some years abroad is not that easy after all. If the financial investments are made on a short-term basis, spending money on a returning expatriate and his family (i.e. an international investment) will not be regarded worthwhile.

2.7.2

Recommendations

There is still a lot to be improved in the field of repatriation on behalf of the MNCs. The repatriation phase is frequently considered to be “the most stressful part of the assignment” (Sanchez/Spector/Cooper 2000: 104) or “the toughest assignment of all” (Hurn 1999). Often the organization changes during the time of the international assignment, or previously made promises are not held. Repatriates may feel isolated when they realize that others do not share their multicultural identification or are not even interested in hearing what they have experienced overseas. Fitting back into the former lifestyle is harder than expected, and home may not really feel like home anymore (cf. Sanchez/Spector/Cooper 2000, Hurn 1999). If companies want to retain valued employees, they need to establish a credible repatriation policy. Before the expatriates actually go overseas, they ought to be aware of their long-term employment prospects (cf. Hurn 1999: 226). Yavas/Bodur (1999: 276) who carried out a study among expatriates working in Turkey also recommend that the parent company explains the career value of the foreign assignment and discusses the future career track with the expatriate. Another very important action that companies can take is to provide the returnees with a debriefing regarding the overseas experience. The employee needs to have an opportunity to inform the company about the success and/or problem areas concerning the international assignment. A “mentor” who keeps an eye on the expatriate’s career may also be appointed by the company (cf. Hurn 1999: 226). Baughn (1995: 217) suggests that effective linkages between the expatriate and the domestic firm be maintained throughout the international assignment in order to avoid discrepancies

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between expectations and actual return experiences. Peterson/Napier/Shul-Shim (2000: 154) asked corporate level IHRM officials what they would recommend to improve the repatriation process. Among the answers given by the interviewees were the following recommendations: early identification of jobs available upon repatriation, paying more attention to the repatriation process, and using expatriate expertise back home upon repatriation. Similar questions were asked to interviewees at the subsidiary level, and their recommendations include: assure jobs to expatriates upon repatriation, and provide the repatriates with more responsible jobs than they had before they went abroad (cf. Peterson/Napier/Shul-Shim 2000: 160). A checklist of critical issues for the HR department is provided by Solomon (2001: 23). Again, the importance of realistic expectations and a post-assignment debriefing is obvious.

2.8 Conceptual Framework
The purpose of this section is to give an overview on the entire expatriate management and to show relationships between antecedents and outcomes, based on the review of the existing literature (cf. sections 2.2 through 2.7). The following conceptual framework includes all factors relevant to the management of expatriates. After an explanation of the individual elements of the framework, a graphical model will be presented (see Figure 4). First, the factors of influence show how the expatriate management is linked to various aspects, both internal and external ones, and the design of specific programs has to take all these factors into account. Second, there are several action parameters that can be taken by the company to manage international assignments. These direct parameters depend not only on the factors of influence, but also on the reasons or purposes for expatriate assignments. The ultimate goal of the whole expatriate management process is of course to achieve efficiency and effectiveness, which can be measured in various ways. This conceptual framework is intended as a guide for expatriate managers. It shows very briefly which factors have to be considered and which action parameters are available for the design of the individual expatriate programs. An ideal situation would be that the IHRM managers design a different program for each individual expatriate, depending on the factors of influence and the specific goals for the assignment.

2.8.1

Factors of Influence

Among the external, or contextual variables, there is the legal system in the country of assignment, including employment laws, human rights situation, labor relations, social security

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and tax regulations, visa policies, and so forth. A second variable is the cultural distance from the home country, also referred to as cultural toughness. The economic situation in the host country (i.e. strength and state of the economy, currency fluctuations, unemployment) also has a certain influence. The political situation depends on the stability and type of government. The socio-cultural dimension refers to differences in business practices and socially accepted behavior among various countries, and the technological dimension influences how headquarters can keep in touch with their expatriate workforce (e.g. internet and e-mail contributed much to the improvement in this aspect). The situation-variables include location and duration of assignment, staff availability, locus of decision (i.e. headquarters or local subsidiaries), and job-specific variables, such as role clarity, novelty, conflict, ambiguity, discretion, and autonomy. The amount of contact with host nationals can also be an important determinant, as well as perceived organizational support (e.g. logistical support, co-worker support, etc.). Another set of variables are the firm-specific determinants, such as the stage in the internationalization process, depending on whether the company has just started to expand into a new market or is already well-established in several countries. The type of industry determines whether there is a large amount of international competition or not. Other factors are size (i.e. number of employees or market share), strategy, structure, reliance on the home-country domestic market, organizational culture novelty, and the international orientation of senior management. The company’s organization refers to questions of structure and process, such as the role of the HR department in the management of expatriates. Among the employee-specific variables are age, marital status, education, language fluency, tenure with company, and family situation (i.e. children, working spouse). Previous international experience and cross-cultural competencies (e.g. cultural awareness, sensitivity) appear to be highly influential as regards the adjustment process. The employee’s nationality (either PCN, TCN, or HCN), spousal support, ability to integrate with locals, and the coping strategies applied by the expatriate can also be factors of influence.

2.8.2

Reasons, Purposes

There are various strategic reasons and purposes for expatriate assignments, and the goals associated with them differ between the individual assignments. These reasons include highlevel negotiation, management of a foreign subsidiary (i.e. exertion of control), development of new markets, transfer of knowledge, bringing a global perspective back to headquarters,

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and the development of management talent (so-called global leaders). These indirect parameters are usually determined by the top management of the company. They are included in this framework because they should (at least theoretically) influence the direct action parameters.

2.8.3

Direct Action Parameters

The IHRM activities can be summarized under the term “direct action parameters”. They include recruitment and selection of expatriate candidates (i.e. use of predictors of success as selection criteria, provide a realistic job preview to the candidate) as well as career planning and management. The effect of cross-cultural training and development depends on the quality, type, and duration of these programs. Performance management should make use of a culturally sensitive performance appraisal system, compensation and benefits include expatriate premiums and hardship compensation. The last function in the expatriation process is support during repatriation, which refers to helping the returning expatriates in dealing with reverse culture shock and re-integrating them into the parent organization.

2.8.4

Efficiency and Effectiveness of the Expatriate Management

The success of the assignment can be measured by a low premature return rate, expatriates who are effectively operating in the country of assignment and meet the goals of the assignment, expatriate performance, and successful repatriation. A high level of adjustment can be considered part of the success of an international assignment (i.e. work, interaction with host nationals, and general non-work adjustment), as well as the organizational commitment of the employee (toward the parent company and the foreign subsidiary).

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2.8.5

Graphical Presentation
Factors of Influence Firm-Specific Variables Stage in Internationalization Process Type of Industry Size, Strategy, Structure Reliance on Home-Country Domestic Market Organizational Culture Novelty Organization of the Company International Orientation of Senior Mgmt.

External/Contextual Variables Legal System Cultural Distance Economic Situation Political Situation Socio-Cultural Dimension Technological Dimension Situation-Variables Location / Duration of Assignment Staff Availability Locus of Decision Job-Specific Variables Contact with HCNs Perceived Organizational Support

Employee-Specific Variables - Age, Marital Status, Education, Language Fluency, Tenure, Family Situation - Previous International Experience - C-C Competencies, Cultural Awareness - Nationality (HCN, PCN, TCN) - Spousal Support - Ability to Integrate with Locals - Coping Strategies

Reasons, Purposes - High-Level Negotiation - Management of Foreign Subsidiaries, Exertion of Control - Development of New Markets - Transfer of Knowledge - Gain a Global Perspective - Development of Management Talent

Action Parameters - Career Planning & Management - Recruitment & Selection - Cross-Cultural Training & Development - Performance Management - Compensation & Benefits - Support during Repatriation

Expatriate Management

Efficiency & Effectiveness Success - Few Premature Returns - Efficiently operating Expatriates - Meeting the Goals of the Assignment - Performance - Successful Repatriation

Level of Adjustment - Work - Interaction with HCNs - General Non-Work Environment

Organizational Commitment - Toward Parent Company - Toward Foreign Subsidiary

Figure 4: Conceptual Framework

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3

Method used for the Empirical Research

Chapter 2 provided an overview on the existing literature on expatriation. The next step will be to carry out an empirical study. The exact method and research questions are going to be discussed in detail in the following sections.

3.1 Qualitative vs. Quantitative Research
At the beginning of each empirical study, there is the major question of whether a qualitative or a quantitative approach should be followed. According to Hakim (2000: 12), the observed bias toward quantitative research as the “ideal” type of study for almost any research topic is not justified, since there is no such thing as a single, universally appropriate study. There is some amount of confusion concerning the distinction between the terms “quantitative” and “qualitative”. What is it that substantially distinguishes those two types of research from one another? The quantitative approach is based on numbers. Usually the sample is rather big, and the researcher applies statistical methods to analyze the often huge amount of data. The goal of this approach is to make numerical statements and find statistically significant relations between individual aspects. The qualitative approach is considered to be essentially “holistic”. The researcher needs various kinds of information in order to analyze and understand certain aspects of human behavior, therefore qualitative research calls for an in-depth characteristic of the data which may be lacking in the more quantitative kinds of research (cf. Podhisita 1991: 9). If the researcher wishes to receive in-depth information, he will probably not be able to use a large sample size in his study, therefore, “the qualitative researcher prefers a small-scale population so that he can focus his efforts on variety and the depth of the data” (Podhisita 1991: 10). As Hannabuss (1996: 22) describes qualitative research, its main focus lies on seeing the social world from the “actor’s” viewpoint. He views the goal of qualitative studies as being able to understand a culture from the inside. For the present paper, a qualitative method was chosen. There are several benefits to this approach: For instance, it deals with the individuals’ own accounts of their attitudes, motivations, and behavior. The researcher can gain insight into the respondents’ perceptions, attitudes, beliefs, views, and feelings. Qualitative research might not result in a complete account or explanation of social processes though, and there is also a strong tendency toward selfjustificatory reports (cf. Hakim 2000: 34). Nevertheless, people’s own definitions of certain situations may allow rich descriptions and be a foundation for explaining the underlying behavioral processes at work (cf. Yoddumnern-Attig/Attig/Boonchalaksi 1991: 3). Or, as was

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stated by Miles/Huberman (1984: 15): “Words, especially when they are organized into incidents or stories, have a concrete, vivid, meaningful flavor that often proves far more convincing to a reader — another researcher, a policy-maker, a practitioner — than pages of numbers.” Of course, there is no research method whatsoever without any disadvantages. The main precautions concerning a qualitative approach are the following. The authors YoddumnernAttig/Attig/Boonchalaksi (1991: 4) mention the danger of probing into the lives and feelings of unfamiliar people, some of whom might not be willing to assist the researcher, but rather try to avoid him. The methodological problems associated with some qualitative research methods are a possible lack of representativeness (due to the usually small sample), lack of reliability (the structure is not very well defined), reactivity (when the investigator’s presence influences the behaviors of the people under observation), and problems concerning replicability. There is finally the problem of “data-overload” (cf. Podhisita 1991: 12-13).

3.2 Semi-Structured, Qualitative Interviews
The literature on qualitative research methods distinguishes between unstructured, focused, and structured interviews. An unstructured, informal interview consists of spontaneously generated questions, and the respondent-interviewer interaction is naturally flowing. There are no previously written interview questions. The conduct of a focused interview calls for a list of in-depth questions on a previously defined subject, but the order and insertion of these questions into the interview may vary. The last category, referred to as structured or standardized interview, puts these pre-specified questions in a given order (cf. Soonthorndhada 1991: 58). Interviews can be either informal, fully structured, or something in-between. The main interest of this paper is not the official company strategy for expatriate management, but how the expatriates themselves experience the whole process and the way they are supported or not by their companies. In order to learn about the expatriates’ feelings and attitudes, a semi-structured, face-to-face interview is considered the best option. It gives the interviewees a chance to talk about their personal views, and they might come up with new ideas the interviewer has not thought of before. According to a recent study by Kraimer/Wayne/Jaworski (2001), perceived organizational support has a direct, positive influence on the expatriates’ adjustment, which in turn directly influences the performance at work. Therefore, a main objective of this study is to find out whether the expatriates feel that they are supported by their parent companies during their

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international assignments, or not. Another goal is to find out other factors that, from the expatriates’ point of view, influence their adjustment, the satisfaction with the expatriate assignment, and their performance. The best way to achieve these goals is to let the expatriates talk freely about their experiences, but also to provide a guideline to make sure all relevant aspects are covered during the interview. Hannabuss enumerates several reasons for the frequent use of interview techniques, such as the interview having its natural basis in human conversation and “allowing the researcher to adjust the pace and style of asking questions so as to bring out the best in the respondents” (Hannabuss 1996: 22). Another advantage is that responses are provided in the form in which the interviewees think, which helps the researcher to examine how the interview partners look at their social world. A researcher using the interview technique is interested in the respondents’ own perspective and the motives behind their decisions (cf. Hannabuss 1996: 23). Some objectives of the present study are, for instance, to find out how the expatriates experience and perceive the support provided by the company, how satisfied they are with their international assignment, what their motives were to go abroad, and so forth. The interview guideline used in the present study consists of a list of questions, and the order is basically set in advance. However, as it is possible that some questions which are placed toward the end of the interview guideline might already be answered at an earlier stage in the interview process, this is considered to be a semi-structured interview guideline. This can happen when the questions are open-ended, i.e. the interviewee is talking freely about his experiences and opinions, and several questions are concerned with similar aspects of the expatriate management. The basic areas treated in the interviews are the following: A. Description of the international assignment (factual information) B. Information on the adjustment process, as experienced by the expatriate C. Support provided during the time of the assignment D. Repatriation, future career of the expatriate E. Self-assessment of the expatriate’s performance F. Self-assessment of the expatriate’s cross-cultural competencies G. Personal opinion on the expatriate experience (e.g. satisfaction, motivation) H. The Selection procedure applied by the company I. Cross-cultural training and preparation for the assignment, as provided by the firm J. The company’s performance appraisal procedure K. Background information on the expatriate and the company Questions in blocks B through G refer to the individual expatriate’s view on the experience of living and working in another country. Questions in blocks H through J refer to the expatri-

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ates’ assessment of the HR management practices of the multinational companies, as opposed to the formal corporate answer the international HR executive would present. The complete guideline is included in the appendix to this paper (see Appendix A). Soonthorndhada (1991: 60) gives some indication as to how the specific questions should be formulated. The basic rules imply that questions be worded simply, understandably, specifically, and as unbiased as possible. The advantage with non-technical questions is that they can be answered without requiring special knowledge the respondents might not have. Questions conveying negative implications, or which are too personal, should be avoided. The most important recommendation is always to ask singular questions. No question should contain more than one basic idea. While actually conducting the interviews, it is crucial for the interviewer to establish rapport with the respondent (cf. Hannabuss 1996: 25), i.e. to get to know each other, gain the respondent’s trust, and establish a relationship and sense of empathy with the respondent. The relationship with the respondents has a direct effect on the success of the interview, e.g. if the interviewer does not manage to communicate a genuine interest in the respondent’s views, that will surely decrease the probability of a successful interview with accurate data. The interviewer also wants to get the balance between interest and prying curiosity. Hannabuss (1996: 26) provides a list of useful interview techniques: “establishing rapport; keeping the discussion going; asking questions which avoid yes/no answers; avoiding jargon and abstractions; avoiding double negatives and loaded expressions; knowing when not to interrupt and even letting silences work for you; being nonjudgmental; and knowing how to focus and pace the interview.” As is the case for qualitative methods in general, there are of course also some disadvantages and (practical) problems associated with the use of interview techniques in particular. According to Hannabuss, interviews are intensive and time-consuming, there is a risk of covering only an unrepresentative sample of respondents, and some respondents may try to deceive the researcher. The risk of researcher bias, of course, is much greater than in quantitative methods. Another problem occurs when respondents say so much that organizing the information afterward can become very time-consuming and complicated (cf. Hannabuss 1996: 23 - 24).

3.3 Sample, Response Rate
The next step is the determination of a sample. A sample is a group of people sharing certain characteristics who are representative of a large population. In the case of the present paper, the sample was defined as a group of recently returned expatriates working for companies

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based in the Pacific Northwest. The expats should have returned to the U.S. within the last two or three years. There are basically two reasons why these so-called “repatriates” were chosen as interviewees: Since they have already returned from their international assignment, they can also talk about the repatriation process, which is an important part of the expatriate experience. Repatriates are also chosen for a very practical reason. The interviews can be conducted locally face-to-face, rather than on the telephone while the expatriates are still working at the foreign location. The reason why only recently returned expatriates were considered is simple: Their memory is still fresh, and they are able to recall many details about their international assignments. In order to find a sufficient number of participants, the first step was to select companies with 500+ employees located in the Pacific Northwest using the International Trade Directory of the relevant states. In a second step, additional information was gathered from the online database “Reference USA” (e.g. existence of foreign locations, name of HR representative). Letters were sent in mid-December 2002 to the HR executives of nearly thirty companies, asking if there were any recently returned expatriates currently working in the Washington/Oregon location, and if it was possible to conduct interviews with their former expatriates in February or March 2003. In those letters, the HR executives were also informed of the purpose of this study and the fact that the data collected will be treated confidentially. A copy of the letter text is enclosed in the appendix (see Appendix B). In mid-January 2003, the individual HR managers were contacted via telephone in order to inquire about the availability of returned expatriates in the particular company. The interview guideline was also sent by e-mail to the HR managers who were interested. Seven of these companies provided repatriates who were willing to participate in this study, and a total of twenty interviews were carried out in February and March of 2003.24 The interviews were conducted face-to-face whenever possible. In some cases, they had to be done over the phone because the person has moved to another state after the overseas posting or is currently on another expatriate assignment. However, no differences in the quality of the data could be observed between these two types of interviews. All of the interviews were recorded on tape with the interviewees’ permission. One of these twenty respondents had bee sent to the United

24

Two of these respondents were not found through their company, but through informal contacts. The researcher did not know any of them personally though.

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States as an inpatriate from another country; all the others had been working abroad as expatriates for U.S.-based companies.25 Almost half of the respondents had had more than one international assignment. In those cases, the questions focused on the most recent one, although several interviewees also volunteered information about their previous assignments. The average interview lasted approximately one hour. They were all conducted in English. The result of this empirical study was roughly twenty hours of recorded interview notes on tapes which were then transformed into 300 pages of transcriptions. These served as the basis for the later analysis of the data (see Chapter 4).

3.4 Research Questions
The empirical study is designed to answer the following research questions: 1. Do business expatriates from the Pacific Northwest in general have a positive or a negative attitude toward their international assignments? 2. Do these expatriates convey the same adjustment experiences as the ones that can be found in the relevant literature? Can the U-Curve Theory of culture shock be confirmed for this sample of expatriates? 3. Are the experiences of these expatriates, as regards support during the international assignment, similar to the ones suggested in the literature? To what extent are the expatriates provided with company support? 4. How do these expatriates experience their repatriation back to their parent companies? Do their experiences match the information found in the relevant literature? 5. How do these expatriates assess their own experience, especially their overseas performance and cross-cultural competencies? 6. How do these expatriates view the IHRM practices of their companies, such as the selection procedure, cross-cultural training, and the companies’ performance appraisal procedures? What differences can be noted compared to the suggestions given by academic researchers? 7. Can one discern any common patterns in the experiences of the Pacific Northwest expatriates?

25

The former inpatriate is back in his home country now, therefore the researcher was able to ask the same questions as in the other interviews, including the ones about repatriation.

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3.5 Data Analysis
Probably the hardest part associated with the qualitative interview method is organizing the huge mass of information gathered during the interviews afterwards. An interview schedule may prove to be very useful here, as it helps focus the responses and ensure some degree of comparability between respondents (cf. Hannabuss 1996: 27). And comparability really is very important, otherwise it would be practically impossible for the researcher to recognize any patterns or concepts in the data collected. There are several techniques for improving the quality and credibility of qualitative analysis. Patton (1999: 1191) suggests that qualitative analysis is a creative process that depends highly on the researcher’s ability to recognize patterns in the vast amount of data collected during the interviews. How can quality and credibility be achieved? The article written by Patton gives some very good advice on how that goal can be attained. One possibility, for instance, is to look for alternative classification systems, themes, and explanations that could be derived from the available data (cf. Patton 1999: 1191), instead of simply looking for data supporting the original hypothesis set by the researcher. To avoid this bias, the formulation of hypotheses was deliberately avoided for the present study, and open research questions were used instead. Another very important recommendation is always to keep methods and data in context, meaning that the data collected from a small sample cannot necessarily be generalized for the whole population (cf. Patton 1999: 1197). This is especially important for the present study, since the sample population is located in a rather small geographical area (i.e. the U.S. Pacific Northwest), and as previous studies have found out, there are substantial differences between business expatriates from the U.S., Western Europe, and Asia. Therefore, the findings of this study may not be true for expatriates from other parts of the world. The credibility of the researcher plays an important role in qualitative interview methods. The researcher’s experience, training, perspective, and personal connections to the topic studied must be given some consideration (cf. Patton 1999: 1198). Again, this factor is especially relevant in the present study, since the researcher is some sort of an expatriate herself, which may help in gaining a better understanding of the experiences made by the interviewees. The selective nature of human perception plays an important role in qualitative interviews. What people “see” depends on their interests, biases, and backgrounds. So maybe another researcher would obtain different findings from the same interviews (cf. Patton 1999: 1199). Therefore, thorough preparation is necessary for the researcher. In the following chapter, the results of the empirical study will be discussed.

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4

Discussion of the Results

The goal of this chapter is to show the results which were gained from the empirical study and to find some common patterns between the individual experiences, correlations between various aspects, and explanations for certain findings. In order to protect the anonymity of the respondents and that of their companies, all the quotes are used without indication of names of people and/or companies. After an overview on the demographic facts and background information of the assignments, there will be an analysis of the adjustment process and the factors relating to adjustment. Next, the HR practices as they are viewed by the expatriates are going to be discussed (i.e. selection, training, and performance evaluation). The next section will deal with the repatriation experiences, followed by a discussion of the expatriates’ personal opinion, and the final part of this chapter is intended to show some other interesting findings and conclusions.

4.1 Demographics of Respondents, Background Information
Table 1 presents the demographics of the 20 repatriates who participated in the study:
Number of Respondents Gender Male Female 20 - 34 years Age range 35 - 44 years 45 - 54 years 55+ years 1 - 5 years Tenure with company 6 - 10 years 11 - 20 years 21 - 30 years 1 Number of expat assignments 2 3 4 or more Less than 1 year Duration of most recent assignment 1 year to 3.5 years 4 years to 6.5 years 7 years to 8 years 18 2 4 7 5 4 2 6 7 5 12 4 1 3 2 11 6 1

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President/managing director Level of job as an expatriate Functional management Professional/staff role Technical specialist Married (Of which: married to a local) Live with a partner Single Divorced Spouse/partner, no children Spouse (children were born there later) Accompanied by… Spouse and children Went alone Went alone, married a local person

2 13 2 3 15 (4) 1 2 2 6 2 5 4 3

Marital status

Table 1: Demographics

As Table 1 clearly shows, the percentage of female expatriates is still very low, comparable to all the other studies cited earlier in the literature review. The countries of their most recent assignments were mainly in Europe and East Asia, and all but two of the respondents returned home from 2001 through January 2003.26 In all cases, their jobs as expatriates included extensive contact and interaction with host nationals. Seventeen out of the 20 respondents stated that they had had more responsibility in the overseas job than they had had before, eight of which had a lot more responsibility. A typical statement would be:
“You asked earlier, did I have more responsibility, and I did, because I got to use all of my experiences, all of my past work history responsibilities.... of seventeen plus years. Back in my domestic job, I had a responsibility only for one area, one specific area. Now, once I went to [country of assignment], I was using everything. So, and... I said, this was the level of frustration and... and uneasiness that I had back in the States, because I was... you know, in such a narrow box. So, it was eye-opening. I have to seek to use more of my experiences in my next job.”

As to the decision-making authority, the results are about the same. Sixteen respondents were able to make more decisions on their own, compared to the job they had before, and only two people had less decision-making authority. In 17 cases, the expatriate was working rather autonomously from headquarters back in the home country. The jobs the expats were assigned to do were often quite similar or at least in the same area as their previous jobs (13 out of 20). Typically, they were working in a similar area as before, but had extended responsibilities, as the following examples illustrate:

26

The other two returned to their home country in August 1999, and September 2000, respectively.

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“It was similar in that it was still in IT, and it was similar in that I was setting up the same things we were already doing here, so that was similar. But the job responsibilities were much more strategic, when before while I was here, it was much more operational or tactical, actually making things happen, there it was kind of giving vision on helping for it to happen.” “It was an extension of what I was doing here. It was similar work, only I ended up with all the responsibility. Because I was the only one there.”

Practically everybody experienced the culture in the host country as very different, the only exceptions being two people who were sent to Scotland and Australia, respectively. Quite frequently, persons who were working in a country that one would expect to be rather similar to the U.S. found it very different, e.g. one person that went to England said:
“There’s so many things. It’s funny, because you think of... Americans and Brits think of... you know, pretty close, because of the commonality of the language and all that stuff, and it’s definitely..., I mean it’s really a foreign country, and the people are definitely foreign from the United States.”

One that was sent to Scotland gave the following answer when asked if the host culture was very different from the U.S. culture:
“Yes, more than I expected. We use the same words, but we don’t speak the same language (laughs). That was pretty entertaining.”

In 15 out of 20 cases, the organizational culture was perceived as rather different from the home company, one of the most frequently mentioned differences being the smaller size of the subsidiary, compared to the headquarter offices at home. Seven of the 20 respondents were working at a wholly owned subsidiary abroad, an equal number were assigned to a joint venture, five were working with a partner company or a supplier, and one was sent to the headquarters in the U.S. as an inpatriate from another country. The most frequently mentioned purpose of the expat assignment was transfer of knowledge, either in the form of managing the foreign subsidiary or bringing technical/business standards from the headquarters and implementing them there at the foreign location (twelve respondents mentioned knowledge transfer as one of their purposes). Five people went overseas to, amongst other things, recruit and hire nationals there, and three respondents said one of their purposes had been to connect headquarters to the local branch. Other purposes were for the expatriate to gain experience in a new area and expand his networking, or to build up operations in a foreign country and start a brand new business there. Some examples would be:
“The original purpose was just to... for me to go over there and gain some operational experience, because I’d always been just at the corporate finance level. I was actually going out to get an experience of being involved directly with the subsidiary more on an operating kind of basis; that was the original attempt.” “My purpose was to review and analyze the IT infrastructure and programs, make recommendations for improvement, and implement those improvements.”

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“There’s only five expatriates and 2000 odd Chinese folks. We’re not gonna go change anything, just try to make it more efficient based on Western cultures. But try to integrate most of it with the Eastern culture.” “To hire Chinese, supervise and hire Chinese nationals. And... put some new processes in place... management processes basically.” “So I was chosen to go... to connect the headquarters to the Chinese market and the expats.”

As to the seven companies in this sample, four of them have been working internationally for 40 years or more. Two started international operations about 20 years ago but had not been sending many expatriates abroad since then. The last one went international six years ago and has experienced a very rapid increase in the number of international locations since then. There is quite a variation in the size of these companies (i.e. the number of employees), as shown in Table 2.
Size category 1000 - 10,000 employees 10,000 - 50,000 employees 50,000 - 100,000 employees 100,000 + employees Number of companies 2 2 2 1

Table 2: Size categories of companies

The seven companies are operating in five different industries, and at least four of them are world or regional leaders in their particular industry.

4.2 Adjustment
4.2.1 The Dimensions of Adjustment

How do the expatriates from the Pacific Northwest experience the adjustment period in the foreign country? Generally, it can be said that most of them were quite well adjusted; some were even very well adjusted. As was described in section 2.4.1.2, there are several aspects of adjustment: Adjustment to the new work environment: Thirteen out of 20 respondents had no problems adjusting to the new job. At the end of the assignment, 15 of them were very well adjusted work-wise, and only one person still felt rather uncomfortable. Adjustment to interacting with host nationals: Again, 13 out of 20 respondents found this aspect quite easy, and 15 people said they had been very well adjusted at the end of their assignment, while the remaining five were at least generally adjusted.

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Adjustment to the general non-work environment in the country: That part seems to be a little bit harder to adjust to, as only seven people experienced it as very easy and never had any problems. Eleven respondents said they had had some minor problems at first, and two people found it quite difficult. At the end, the level of adjustment was fairly high for most respondents. Fifteen were very well adjusted, and no more than one person still had some problems and felt only somewhat adjusted. Psychological adjustment: Fifteen out of 20 reported to have felt very comfortable in the host country at the end of their assignments, and four people felt at least generally adjusted in that aspect. The first three points — work, interaction, and non-work environment — refer to the category “socio-cultural adjustment”, as it was developed by the authors Black & Stephens and Black, Mendenhall & Oddou.27 Earlier in this paper, the nine dimensions of culture were introduced. They all vary across countries, and all but one of these nine dimensions was commented on by the expats in this sample:28 Time issues: Punctuality is measured differently, people have a different sense of urgency, and the pace of work (or life in general) is slower than in the U.S. Space: In Asia, the streets are more crowded, there is less personal space (which might be a reason for the often-mentioned lack of politeness in these countries). Relationships: Especially the concept of trust is very different in other countries. Hierarchy: The organizational culture sometimes is more hierarchical than in the U.S. Status attainment: In certain countries, success is extremely important, and a person is considered nothing unless he or she achieves a certain success. Diversity receptivity: Men in other cultures might not be willing to accept a woman as a boss and to answer to her. In certain Asian countries, women are not promoted to management positions. Change tolerance: Often there is resistance to change, and the recommendations made by the expats are not implemented permanently by the local workforce. Communication: Especially in Asian countries, the non-verbal communication is much more prominent than in Western cultures. People are also much more afraid of losing face; therefore, they do not always say what they really think. Group dependence: No one mentioned any cultural differences in this aspect.

27 28

See section 2.4.1 See also section 2.4.1

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4.2.1.1

Adjustment to the New Work Environment

Working in another country, with people from different cultures, is never the same as working at home where everything is familiar and one knows most everybody. Sometimes the companies seem to forget that, as can be illustrated by the following quote:
“Well, it is different. But I think I was able to probably adjust faster than others because I already went through it once in [country X]. But it still was not fast. It’s not very easy really. It’s not as easy as the people in the home country think it is. I guarantee you that.”

There is one particularly difficult aspect that was mentioned by several respondents, and that is the pace of work. There seem to be major differences as regards time issues between the various cultures. Several quotes illustrate this aspect very clearly:
“Uhm... I would say the only difficulty would be that the Australian culture is to... not get too excited about things. And they don’t work at the fast pace that we do here in America. And you don’t really realize how fast-paced we are here until... you know, their approach to things was much more laid-back, you know ‘We’ll get around to it, don’t worry about it, it’ll happen’, and so I really had to adjust my pace to theirs. There was no sense in trying to change the world, you can’t do that. So... (laughs), you adjust to it.” “People don’t give you any feedback. American, Western culture is very much... we’re tackling the problems and dealing with them, trying to do things the fastest and most efficient way. How we do business... In the Chinese culture it’s more... it’s like a grace period where people feel you out, that can last anywhere from a couple of months to a year. When you have project deliverables that are measured in Western culture timeframes that can be very problematic. So immediately I clashed the heads with a lot of the other senior management because I had deliverables from my headquarters, and I was supposed to do it in a twelve months period.”

Another problem associated with being only on a temporary assignment is the inability to make a permanent impact in the host organization, as was stated by more than one person:
“It was frustrating, because I did understand it. Not understanding, you can go ‘well, maybe I don’t understand something’. But at the end I had a very good understanding of how they did work or didn’t work, and probably the most frustrating part of that was knowing that I was only there for a very... defined period of time. And it didn’t take the nationals long to realize that I was only there for that period of time, and some comments were actually made ‘well, we’ll just do it this way while he’s here, and when he goes home we go back to doing it the way we know how to do it’.”

This person simply did not feel very comfortable with the way of work in the host country:
“Aaah... it was... there were things that I needed to adjust to. And I was willing and able to adjust to them. But there were certain, you know, certain challenges in those adjustments. I don’t wanna say it was easy. There were significant changes. […] I know that I adjusted. I know that I did not like it...., the methods in which they did work. So, I adjusted to it, but I did not like it. It was a stress and a strain to have to work in that kind of situation. I don’t know the term ‘adjusted’. I mean, as a person, I can adjust to any environment. But... again, you know, I could perform my... my duties. But I always felt that it wasn’t the best method, a method that I was comfortable with, a method that I thought was going to be ultimately successful. And that was troublesome.”

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4.2.1.2

Adjustment to Interaction with Host Nationals

The typical expatriate assignment involves a large degree of interaction with host country nationals. Several respondents experienced certain difficulties here, as for example:
“In terms of working with the procurement channels, and negotiating purchase contracts, service contracts, support... that was very challenging. They don’t negotiate contracts the way we do in the States. Almost without legal form or standard, everything seems to be, you know, case by case, and a lot of it really done in Chinese...in the Chinese bargaining tactics and... if any party was unsatisfied with the negotiation it was escalating. That was very challenging.” “[Name of country] is a little uuhm... behind as far as development in business and women in management positions. I did have a couple of issues with gentlemen that had a little difficulty answering to a woman and... nothing major, but that’s still something that they are getting used to in [name of country]. There’s a lot of women in business, but there’s a lot of men that are still trying to adjust to that. They don’t like to answer to a woman.”

The most commonly cited problem in this area is of course the language.
“Still... the one issue that they had with me was about English. I never really learned Finnish while I was there and I think they would have much more appreciated it anyway... if I had been able to speak their language.”

With a few exceptions, most of the American expats did not speak the local language very well or not at all. Only four of the 20 respondents were able to speak the language before they went abroad, while twelve did not speak it or knew only a few words.29 Two people who were already able to speak the local language had been to the country of assignment before, as a teenager or student, one was born there and learned the language from his parents, and only one of them had learned it at school.30 Only one person really learned the local language while on assignment. With the exception of one person though, everybody made the effort to learn at least a little bit of the language. Six reported the reason why they had only learned a little bit or nothing had been the lack of time, as for example the following quote shows:
“They gave you an option to take language training, but I’d like to know how they’re expecting us to do that with a twelve hour workday. - No time? - Nooo. - Did you try it first? - Phhhh… there was no room in the schedule.”

The majority of respondents though found the interaction with their host national co-workers rather easy. One person who really enjoyed being in the host country and made many friends there described his relationship with the local staff in the following way:
“I mean, they even made me like an honorary Brit and all this kind of stuff, so I got on with them just fantastically.”

Another person who seemed to be able to integrate really well with the local workforce said:

29 30

The remaining four people were sent to an English-speaking country, so language was not an issue for them. This was the European inpatriate who was sent to the USA.

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“There are two kinds of people. In China, there are the people that welcome a friendship, and then there are the ones that are suspicious. But I found it easy because they, in both cases, the factory people knew that I was the kind who learns the language, and they helped me.”

4.2.1.3

Adjustment to the General Non-Work Environment in the Host Country

The two most often mentioned adjustment problems were associated with either food or traffic. Practically everybody made some comments about those aspects. The reason for that is quite obvious: Those are things we have to deal with every day, therefore they are important.
“But the biggest... interesting thing is grocery shopping... trying to figure out what the equivalents were... in terms of figuring out what foods were available for recipes, and usually they’d have them but they would be in totally different shapes, and they would locate them differently. [...] And the other thing that’s completely different is... our refrigerators are huge compared to the way they have them over there. [...] And for my wife, everything of course is in metrics, volume and weight. And so, trying to translate recipes was a continuing challenge. The cooking appliances were different. So, trying to cook on the appliances, trying to figure out how much food to buy because the storage was smaller.[...] The variety of food... on the plus side there was really good Indian food that we didn’t have here, on the minus side Mexican and Chinese food wasn’t as good as it is here. You know, American food vs. British food, that’s a tough trade-off anyway. [...] Shopping is definitely better…, much better produce over there. According to my wife, much better dry soup… dry soups are better over there, they have more variety. Instant soups, whatever.” “Food... there was... you know, food is food, you look at it, and you can tell what it is. Yeah, there were sometimes... with the frozen food you’re not sure what you’re buying, and we had a few surprises when we got home, but... hey, life is an adventure, so what the heck, you know. I think I adjusted pretty fast. The traffic was horrible. Yeah, a ten-hour day is automatically a twelve, fourteenhour day minimum because of the traffic.” “Never got used to the traffic. It’s just... it’s the worst traffic in the world. Uuhm... the food... some of it, yeah. I’m very picky about what I eat. So I didn’t typically eat traditional Chinese food because it was just kind of too radical. You know, I wasn’t eating jellyfish soup, snakes and snake soup. But for the most part I didn’t have any problems.” “What was the most striking difference? - Traffic... it was pretty bad. [...] Things were different, you adjusted to them. You know, uuhm, again, using the traffic as an example: It’s stuff that you just had to deal with, otherwise you’d get run over. And... uhm, I did not like it, but it had to be dealt with. And it was always going to be, no matter what you say, that was always gonna be a challenge. A hundred years, and it would always be a challenge. [...] Using the traffic analogy, you know, the... the cutting in front of you in line, or... or bumping into you, or whatever without a simple... you know, excuse me... or thank you or... whatever. I find that an affront to me, and to my family. And they tolerated it. [...] I really observed... and commented profusely about the traffic while I was there.”

Something that seems to be especially problematic for American expats is having to get used to a more limited choice. In America, everything is very convenient; most things are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Many shops are open all the time; you can get anything you like any time you like. In other countries this is not always possible, and quite frequently it proved to make the adjustment a little bit more difficult. Several comments were made like:
“Well, many of the things we were used to buying and services we had available relatively conveniently to where we lived... were not available there. So we had to make a lot of effort and do research to find out either where to get those things or what could be substituted for that thing. And

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then we probably..., in most cases..., if it wasn’t the same, we had to make some accommodation to work with what was available. So that was a bit more difficult.” “I think one of our friends that..., he was Dutch and would always talk about being in America, […], and his comment was: ‘In the United States it’s just so damn convenient.’ There’s so many choices in America that consumers are faced and forced to make that are not important. You know, going to the grocery store and see olive oil, there’s a whole section of olive oil and different kinds of flavors of olive oil vs. there’s just olive oil. You know, the selection and choices that you have to make in your personal life, a day-to-day choice in America is completely overwhelming, the people in other countries aren’t forced to make those choices, they’re not available to them. It’s not good or bad, it’s just different. And so, the whole aspect of being an American and how you grow up with so much convenience and choice, when you go to other parts of the world, even if the economy is just as wealthy, but they don’t have those kinds of choices.”

The following two quotes illustrate how two people who were sent to the same country had very different impressions as to the difficulties involved with adjusting to this country:
“Yeah, I just loved it. I totally loved, enjoyed the liveliness and the chaos of China. You can walk down the street every day, the same street, and see something totally different. [...] When I went there it was very easy to become... to blend in... acclimate myself to the differences in culture, the weather, and...” “I think that was probably the hardest part of this. For the first year, I think I spent most of my time at work. And... because I couldn’t speak the language, I was limited to my surroundings... I just stayed at the hotel, it was more like lonely, quiet. [...] - Why did you find it hard to adjust to the country? What was the biggest problem for you? - I think number one would probably be the language. The ability to move around independently. Because they have taxis, that made it a little bit easier. But you still have to be able to communicate. And the second one would be the population, that would be the second one about getting used to. The people. Because there were so many there. Everybody was so busy. Over here we have traffic rush, over there they have pedestrian rush.”

The majority of the interviewees seemed to be able to have gained quite a deep understanding of the foreign culture while on assignment, they have made detailed observations of cultural differences and really appear to have thought profoundly about that. Very few only mentioned rather superficial observations when asked about cultural differences in the host country.

4.2.1.4

Psychological Adjustment

Several respondents finally reached a point where they felt so comfortable in the host country that they did not even want to go back to America anymore:
“Oh, completely, yes, fully comfortable and fully... you know, there was no reason from a cultural standpoint to say ‘We want to leave.’ There was no... ‘I got to run home to be in America’. None of that. We felt very much at home.” “Very comfortable, I didn’t want to leave.”

Others were a bit less sure:
“At the end... I had mixed feelings about it all. I knew that I wanted to come home. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to stay. And I knew that we would miss being in Taiwan. So we had really mixed feelings. I was definitely excited to come back. We actually started to feel like Taiwan was home.”

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Again, the majority felt very comfortable in the host country, even the ones which had had some minor problems initially. At the end of the assignment, 19 out of 20 were at least generally adjusted in that aspect, and only one person seemed to feel rather uncomfortable still:
“But psychologically I think it would be more like... your life’s on hold until you come back. - Did you never really feel at home there, really comfortable? - No. I don’t think anybody can feel comfortably at home vs. coming back. The thing about being an expatriate is... going abroad and working on an assignment is... everything is on a temporary... It’s like you put your life on hold for this one assignment. I think a lot of the personal stuff beside work was probably most likely on hold. That’s where you need to come back to in order to feel back home.”

Two other interviewees also had the feeling that their life (or the spouse’s life, respectively) was put on hold during the time of assignment.

4.2.2

Culture Shock and the U-Curve of Adjustment

Can the U-Curve of Adjustment, as introduced in section 2.4.1.1, be confirmed for this sample of expatriates? Eight out of the 20 respondents admitted to have experienced some kind of culture shock, while the remaining twelve said they had never had any culture shock at all. Four persons actually described an experience representing the typical U-curve pattern, with the honeymoon stage first, then at a certain point of time the disillusionment starts to set in and you’re in culture shock, and after a while you’re beginning to slowly adapt to the new environment until you finally reach the mastery stage. Figure 5 shows the beginning and ending of the culture shock period for each of the eight respondents who did have culture shock.

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Persons

Duration of Assignment

Culture Shock

5

10

15

20

25

30 Months

Figure 5: Beginning and Ending of Culture Shock Period

In the Black/Mendenhall/Oddou model, which was described in Chapter 2, culture shock usually sets in after about three to six months, and it takes almost four years until the mastery stage of full adjustment is reached. As can be seen in Figure 5, the timing and duration of culture shock varies greatly from person to person in this sample. One reason for these big variances in the durations might be that some people were only talking about the period of actual culture shock up to the point where they started to really adjust, and in some cases, they were probably referring to the point where they had reached the mastery stage; therefore these results are not fully comparable. Some expatriates also did not stay long enough to reach the actual mastery stage, but were at least somewhere in the adjustment phase. However, the validity of the U-curve theory can be more or less confirmed, but there are certainly differences between the individual persons. Some had fairly bad culture shock, for others it was barely noticeable. The ways the expatriates experience culture shock are also varying. The following quotes are very illustrative examples of the first two stages of the U-curve experience:

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“I went over there the first month by myself. And you know, you’re initially overwhelmed with the kind of life there. And then you start to settle down and get into things, you know. And then you start to miss your family. That was after about two weeks when I really started to miss my family. And then two weeks later they joined me. And then we all had to get adjusted to each other being there and living somewhat differently. You know, those things are challenging and exciting all at the same time. And then you get settled. This is life now, for us... You start to enjoy the new surroundings together. You’re almost having no time to really know how you feel. Everything’s confusing, everything is exciting. Then you’ve settled in. It took about two months, you know, sixty days to settle in. And then you start to say: ‘It’s difficult, it’s different, it’s challenging’. You know, this is not the normal way. After two months. And in the next thirty day period, toward the end of the first quarter, then you start to say: ‘Oh my god’, or, you know, ‘I don’t like this’, or, ‘I’m really missing home, and I wanna get back’. So... I would say somewhere between sixty and ninety days, you know, shock starts to really set in. And it takes some time maybe, you know, another thirty to sixty days to really get over it. Somewhere toward the first six months you have to make a decision, you know. I can do this, or it’s too much. So it’s in that period of five to seven months when things are... you’re not sure. You’re just settling in. You do miss home. You might wanna go back. You’re not sure yourself.” “When you first arrive you’re in the mindset of exploring, and everything is new. And then once it wears off, you know, somewhere between 60 to 90 days in, depending on how quickly you move in to a normal house and out of your temporary housing or hotel or whatever, at some point it kind of hits you, that ‘Oh, we’re here. This is not a vacation. It’s not... this is our life.’ And then..., at that point it’s the frustration of... of... again, it’s the simple things that then take so much more time, that then you realize that you’re frustrated. Whether... getting food, or seeking medical care..., all the things that are so easy at home, whether your home is the United States or wherever is home, you know how it works. You know, it’s all those day-to-day living things that then bring you back to the reality of... you’re in culture shock.” “Yeah, I think there was probably a point at which I stopped and went ‘Wow. I’m really staying here.’ But it wasn’t a negative thing, just a realization. ‘This is for real. I’m really here.’ That kind of thing. - Do you remember when that was? - I think it was probably a couple of months into it. You know, the first full month it’s all fun and games, and when you really settle down to a routine, a daily routine, you realize you’re commuting to work every morning along with everybody else. And do you remember how long it took, the culture shock period? - Oohh... I’d say probably two or three months where you’re just getting used to the way things run differently, getting acclimated to doing your shopping differently, doing timing things differently, [...].”31

Another person had a very different experience and remembers exactly when the culture shock started:
“It was like in the fifth month; I’d gone shopping... it was actually a Costco. And there’s a lot of people in Taipeh. It’s very crowded. So... twenty, thirty thousand could be in this Costco. And over the microphone, they’re telling you the prices of the products. So you have all these different noises. And people got no concept of personal space like we do. And all this noise... It kind of hit me... ‘Not Kansas City anymore’ type of thing. - Do you remember how long it took you to get over the culture shock? When did you feel it was over? - To be honest with you, that was on the way to the airport, on my way back here. It takes you about a year to adjust.”

Two people who did not have culture shock at all made the following statements:

31

These persons finally reached a stage where they were pretty well adjusted to living in the new country, so they did experience the full U-curve with all four stages — or at least the first three phases.

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“In my case I would say: very little. - When was that? How long did that take? - For me... very difficult to even identify. I’m aware of the studies and how... what happens with people. I’ve traveled so much, worked in so many different kinds of situations that...I know what happens.” “I would say... my wife is Japanese, and she grew up in Japan until she was twelve, and then she moved to the United States, and then she traveled back and forth to Japan many times. I think because we both had that experience of living in another culture... I personally didn’t experience much, if any, and I don’t think she did either. - You didn’t notice any real culture shock? - No, I mean... I may have forgotten it now. But it wasn’t significant enough for me to remember.”

Those two quotes are rather typical, as many of the people who had no culture shock attributed this to their previous experience in foreign countries or knowledge about these countries. Another person who had no culture shock whatsoever and really enjoyed the host country said:
“Going over there... no, it wasn’t really culture shock because... I knew quite a bit what to expect. And it was very pleasant, so it wasn’t a shock, it was more like interesting and enjoyable really. I never really wanted to come back here. It was kind of like... if anything, I think you got a question on reverse culture shock later on. Yeah, but never... never had culture shock and always just absolutely loved to be over there and never really missed being here at all.”

Rather surprisingly, culture shock does not only occur in cultures that are perceived by the expatriate as very different from the home country, as was suggested in section 2.4.1. The supposition that culture shock is correlated to cultural difference is only supported by seven of the 20 respondents (they were in a culture they perceived as very different and had culture shock, or were in a similar culture without culture shock, respectively). The remaining 13 people had contrary experiences and did not support this supposition.

4.2.3

Company Support during the Period of Adjustment

This seems to be one of the areas where the companies still need to make some major improvements. Only four out of 20 respondents said they were happy with the support provided by their companies. Another four stated that they had declined the support that was offered because they felt it wasn’t necessary, and nine persons did not receive any support at all, or they were not happy with the support provided because it didn’t fit their needs. Three people said there had been no support offered, and they hadn’t needed any. On the other hand, eleven respondents perceived their organization as being supportive in general (not necessarily in connection with the adjustment as an expatriate though), while only seven said they wished they would be more supported. The remaining two did not need any support and therefore did not miss it. One person who was very satisfied with the support stated:
“[Name of company] was very good at understanding some of the challenges that we had. I never felt alone. So it was never like, you’re just there and doing things yourself. They never forgot you.”

Another person who did not feel so much supported and prepared by the company said:

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“I think it would make sense to have some kind of orientation ahead of time, but... there wasn’t any. I don’t know. I just picked up what was going on there. Instead of an orientation, there were all these rumors and stuff from people, that’s not too useful.”

One reason for the lack of adequate support could be the missing communication between the various country divisions of big international companies or between headquarters and the expatriates. The following quote may probably be true for many companies: “They didn’t always understand what you were looking for”. Some firms seem to be aware of this problem already, as the following example shows:
“Would you have liked some support? - Uhm... I don’t think it was really necessary in [country of assignment]. I do believe where we have been sending people to more difficult countries, countries that aren’t as alike to the United States, I think it should be there for those expats. Especially Asian countries, because that is an incredibly different culture. I think it’s definitely something that [name of company] has put on their priority list as something they don’t do well... either sending them or bringing them back. And I know it’s been discussed several times since my return that we really need to get better support for this, because we’re doing more and more of it.”

As to the logistical support and help with practical things, that hardly ever seemed to be a problem. In this sample, there was not one person who claimed to have received too little support during the move or with shipping goods, finding a place to live, and so forth. What was missing was more the social or cultural aspect, career-related help, and supporting the expats during the difficult period of culture shock. In most cases though, even if there was not much company-instituted help or support, there were always individuals in the company who were very supportive and helped with the adjustment. That could be either local staff, other expatriate co-workers, or in some cases it was the local boss, who was also an expat from the home country. Quite frequently, support was also found outside of the company, as in spouse and family or other expatriates that lived in the same town. Table 3 shows the most often stated sources of support (Note: one person can mention several sources).
Main source of support Employees of local company Other expats (at work) Boss (expat from home country) Company-instituted support Other expats (non-work) Spouse, family Other local people (non-work) Friends/family from home Number of respondents 6 5 3 5 7 7 3 1

Table 3: Main source of support

What seems to be very helpful in the adjustment process is having someone to talk to who is experiencing similar problems, i.e. other expatriates who have already been there for a while

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and know where the grocery shops are, where to get certain things, and what kind of difficulties newcomers have to deal with. Several interviewees made comments like:
“I think when expats get together, they always complain, and you know, kind of commiserate together, or talk about good things.” “Uhm, I think it was just... having someone to talk to who’s going through the same thing as you are. Some of them had been in the country two, three, five years, and others like myself were brand new to the country, so it was fun to compare notes.”

So far it was discussed how well adjusted the expatriates were and what kinds of problems they experienced in the host country. In the next section, factors that actually help with the adjustment and others, which have no influence at all, will be discussed.

4.2.4

Correlates of Adjustment

For the work-related aspect, previous experience is clearly considered helpful. Those who found the adjustment easy were often doing something similar before, or already knew the people they were going to work with, as can be illustrated by the following quotes:
“Yes, fairly simple. In the work setting, there were some things that were done differently. Mainly because we’re moving from the headquarters area R&D organization in the U.S. into production organization. My experience in the past, I had worked in production before, so I understood the organization structure and how it works. And so, it was relatively simple to make that adaptation.” “Fairly easy, yes... having done this three times before, I was not completely inexperienced. - Did you do similar things on your previous assignments? - Well, different kinds of work, but as you do more of this kind of thing, you understand what you’re going to have to deal with in terms of new work environment.” “I knew the people who were there. - You knew them before you went? - Yeah. We used to all work here together. So, going over was pretty comfortable.”

Rather surprisingly, no significant relation could be found between either role clarity, novelty, or ambiguity, and work adjustment. Neither is there any obvious relationship between corporate career development activities and work adjustment. As to the adjustment to interacting with host nationals, there is one thing in particular that would help a lot, and that is the ability to speak the language of the host country, or at least the willingness to make some efforts to learn it. This is probably one big disadvantage of American (and other English-speaking) expatriates, because often they don’t feel it’s necessary to learn the language - “There was never the need, it wasn’t required to survive” - but really the people in the host country appreciate it when a foreigner tries to learn a few words in the local language.
“I think that what we found, more than anything, was that the nature of human beings, the nature of people, is much more universal. So, your willingness to work through a problem, even though you may not be able to communicate directly, you know, as soon as we made any attempt, whether it be

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with the dictionary at hand or whatever, to speak enough Czech or Chinese to try to communicate, uhm..., you know, there was an openness to problem-solving and put your differences away.”

Or, put very briefly: “Being able to speak Mandarin would have helped”. Some of the respondents felt they should have learned the language better, but not everybody thought this was important. Of course, the personality of the individual expatriate also is of great importance. If someone is outgoing and able to establish new relationships, the person is less likely to experience troubles with this aspect of adjustment. One person who obviously got along quite well with the local employees said:
“It was fairly easy, because I’m a pretty outgoing person and I believe in having a lot of fun at work. And so I think I’ve come across to them as more reachable, and I think that helped. I was called at the company ‘the big teddy bear’.”

When you have to adjust to living in a foreign country, knowledge about that particular place is definitely helpful. People who go abroad without this knowledge find it more difficult to adjust.
“When I first went over to Japan... when I first went fifteen years ago on my own, yeah, there was a lot of differences, I mean it’s a completely different culture, I knew nothing about Japan. I’d seen the movie ‘Shogun’ on television, that was the extent of my knowledge. So, everything was new and different, there were a lot of things I needed to adjust to.”

This person went to the same country again later, and because he already knew the country then, he found it much easier the second time and adapted easily. Another person stated:
“I traveled all through Asia, and the only place I ever went that I was uncomfortable with was India. And I think the reason was because I knew so little about India. And I went there expecting it to be like the rest of Asia, and it’s not at all like the rest of Asia. So it was my lack of knowledge about India at all, I knew nothing about the history, about their culture, and so I found it intimidating and difficult. So, maybe one of the reasons I got along well in China and in Japan was because before I went to Japan I was knowing a lot about Japan, had studied a lot, spoke the language. China... when I went to China, I read a lot of material about China, I read a lot about their history, so I knew more about it. So again, I guess you can say... the less you know about a country, the harder time you will have adapting.”

According to the literature, the factors that influence the shape of the U-curve or the duration of the individual phases are anticipatory adjustment and individual differences.32 The results of the present study clearly support this proposition. Anticipatory adjustment was very often gained through previous international experience or self-preparation of the expatriate. To a much lesser extent, it was gained through company-instituted training, which is rather surprising.33

32 33

See section 2.4.1.1 (cf. Black/Mendenhall/Oddou 1991: 243) See also section 4.3 about the HR practices.

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Individual differences that seem to promote the adjustment process are an outgoing personality, ability to integrate with host nationals and make friends, willingness to take on an adventure and try some new things, cultural sensitivity and the ability to recognize positive aspects of the host culture, and the willingness to learn at least a little bit of the language. There might be a third factor which, for some expatriates, could be equally important as the other two factors, and this is perceived organizational support. A few expatriates said the adjustment was easier because they had so much support from their company, while on the other hand, quite a large number of respondents mentioned the lack of company support, and how it would have helped them if they had had some support from their companies. This can negatively influence motivation, which of course does not make the adjustment any easier. It does not matter so much what the company really does for their expatriates, but how they perceive this support. It appears to be very important for several of the expats to have a feeling that they are not forgotten, to know that people at headquarters care about them and are interested in what they are doing. It is not so much the practical help that is appreciated (and this is hardly ever a problem anyway), but more the emotional support and the interest shown by company officials. For example, five people who were all working for the same corporation and were sent to the same country of assignment had very different impressions regarding the amount of support received by their company, while most likely they were all given the same amount of support and help. Table 4 shows the factor(s) that contributed most to the adjustment for each individual person.
No. Factor of influence 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Personality (socialized with locals all the time) Anticipatory adjustment (work experience in same area) Personality (self-confident, setting his own direction, identified with host culture, outgoing, adventurous, flexible, makes friends easily) Missing anticipatory adjustment Perceived organizational support (POS) Anticipatory adjustment (self-preparation, previous experience in other countries) Anticipatory adjustment (had another assignment before, in another country) POS (local staff & parent company) Anticipatory adjustment (was there several times before) POS (local staff) Personality (adventurous, outgoing, ability to establish relationships, identification with host culture) Helped with which aspect of adjustment Non-work environment Work Work, interaction, non-work environment Person believes it would have helped with all three aspects Work Work, interaction Work, non-work environment Work, interaction, non-work (helped a little with all aspects) Interaction, work, non-work environment Interaction, non-work environment Interaction, non-work environment

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10

11 12 13

14

15 16 17 18 19 20

Anticipatory adjustment (another assignment in the same region, self-preparation) Anticipatory adjustment (similar job) Anticipatory adjustment (previous experience in the same region) Anticipatory adjustment (knew the co-workers already) Personality (outgoing, have fun at work, life is an adventure, lots of local friends) Anticipatory adjustment (short term assignments to the country, knew the people) Personality (socialized with locals, integrated into their lifestyle, spoke language, identification with host culture) Anticipatory adjustment (lived there before, knew the country, got married there, knew the future job) Anticipatory adjustment (knew the language, was in the country before) Personality (motivation, willingness to make friends, identification with host culture) Anticipatory adjustment (self-preparation) Personality (learned language on his own, went to the university there, interest in cultures, socialized with locals) Personality (learned language on his own, not as arrogant as others, socialized with locals, made friends easily) Anticipatory adjustment (has traveled to the region for 10 years) POS (expat boss in the country) Anticipatory adjustment (several asgts. to other countries, short-term asgt. to region)

Non-work Work Non-work environment Work Interaction, non-work environment Work, interaction Interaction, non-work environment Interaction, work, non-work environment Non-work Interaction, non-work environment Non-work environment Work, interaction, non-work Work, interaction, non-work environment Interaction Work Interaction

Table 4: Factors that influence the various aspects of adjustment

As can be seen in Table 4, the different factors of influence are related to different aspects of adjustment. Previous short-term assignments to the same country may well help with work and interaction adjustment, but they do not prepare you for the day-to-day living in the country, e.g. grocery shopping. Previous long-term assignments to other countries might help with the non-work adjustment under certain circumstances, in terms of being used to moving and having to make new friends, for example. However, experience with other Western cultures does not necessarily help to adjust in an Eastern culture like China. An outgoing, flexible personality, and openness to new experiences can help with all three aspects of adjustment. There are three other factors, which are potentially related to the adjustment, and these are: identification with home/host country, socialization primarily with expats/locals, and loyalty to home/host company. As to the identification with the country, it was found that those who identified more with the host country were more likely to be very well adjusted to the non-work environment and also psychologically adjusted, compared to those who identified more with the home country. The same holds true for those respondents who still identified with the home country but gained a better appreciation for the host country; they were also more likely to be very well adjusted. The numerical distribution is shown in Table 5.

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Identification with… Home country Host country Home country, but gained better appreciation for host country

Number of respondents 9 4 7

Very well adjusted to the non-work environment 5 4 6

Very well psychologically adjusted 4 4 6

Table 5: Identification with country vs. adjustment

The amount of socialization with either locals or other expats seems to influence only the psychological adjustment; it does not have any influence on adjustment to the non-work environment in the host country or the interaction. Generally, it can be said that everybody who reported to have socialized clearly more with the locals was also very well psychologically adjusted. Only half of those who socialized more with other expatriates or with both locals and expats were very well psychologically adjusted. Table 6 shows the numerical distribution.
Socialization Clearly more with locals More with expats or with both expats & locals Number of respondents 8 12 Very well psychologically adjusted 8 6

Table 6: Socialization vs. adjustment

The last one of these factors is the loyalty to the company. Those who were either loyal to the host company or had a dual loyalty to both parent and host company were more likely to be very well adjusted work-wise and psychologically, compared to those who felt more loyal to the parent company. Table 7 shows the numerical distribution for this relationship.
Loyalty to… Parent company Host company or dual loyalty (both parent & host) Number of respondents 4 16 Very well adjusted work-wise 1 14 Very well psychologically adjusted 0 14

Table 7: Loyalty to company vs. adjustment

No relation whatsoever could be established between cross-cultural training provided by the company and any aspect of adjustment. In the next section, it will be examined if the adjustment of the family has any influence on the adjustment of the working expatriate.

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4.2.5

Family Adjustment

Fifteen expatriates had their spouse with them during the most recent assignment, two of whom married a local woman while on the expatriate assignment.34 Spouses can play two different roles for the expatriates: They can either be a source of emotional support, share the adventure, and enjoy being in the foreign country; or if they feel unhappy and homesick, they can make their partners feel bad about them. There are three factors that clearly help the spouse to adjust in the foreign country: All five wives who originally came from the same region found it easier to adjust, as for example:
“She is from Japan. So, being in an Asian culture was somewhat familiar to her. And plus, she loves foreign cultures, and she gives in to that. She adjusted... to all of it, pretty well.”

Having a job there makes the adjustment easier. Three wives were working in the foreign country, and two of them found it very easy to adjust.35 An example of a spouse who was very well adjusted because she had a job can be found in the following statement:
“She used to be the vice president controller of a media company in the U.S., and she just... she’d been working quite some time... just decided to take a break and come over there. So she actually worked in a retail environment, at a store called Debenham’s, at the cosmetics counter, like for a minimum wage or whatever, and interacted with all the people. She just loved being there, but occasionally, because of the cultural differences in the customer service environment, it was kind of an interesting thing. And she did really well. She just ended up being the person like that everybody came to for everything. She could have run this whole store kind of thing. But other than just minor little nuisances and things... things were just British. It was fine. She adjusted just like I did very well.”

Others were not so lucky in finding a job and therefore found it a bit more problematic to adjust to the host country:
“Probably the most dramatic set of changes is for the accompanying spouse, especially if she can’t work. Now, my wife being a registered nurse, it is very difficult to work outside of your home country, because you can’t pass the tests, etc. etc. So she initially didn’t work, she found work when we were in [country] through the school, and did... you know, teaching of health, and different things like that that she could do.”

Five spouses had young children to take care of, and four of them were very well adjusted. An example of this would be:
“She is very adventurous and tolerant, so it was easy for her. Some things were inconvenient of course, but overall it was a good experience for her, and in fact, she as well as the children would like to go back there. She was never upset. She had no culture shock. - Did she work there? - No,

34 35

One other person married a local woman on a previous assignment, but she didn’t join him on the next one. None of the companies helped finding a job for the spouse. They all found it on their own.

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she didn’t. But she had a lot of friends there. She likes to be at home and do things with the kids, and she got involved with the school there.”

About half of the accompanying spouses or partners (seven out of 15) found it rather difficult to adjust to the new country. Three of them had neither a job nor young children to take care of. One went to school, one was working only part-time, one had children who went to school during the day, and one had young children. Some examples of the problems they faced are:
“My wife didn’t ever really try to get engaged with the local culture. She doesn’t tend to be a very social person here. So, from a people interaction standpoint, we never really did much of that. We were only there for two years. I think she was probably ready to come back after a year. - Did she work there at all? - No, she didn’t work. She retired just before we went over. So that was an adjustment for her, a combination of retirement... she had been looking forward to doing a bunch of things here, so that was kind of put on hold while we were there. She was going through two kinds of things at once. She basically worked for 30 years and then retired, and then we moved, so... it was kind if a double adjustment. Adjusting to retirement and adjusting to the culture difference. She refused... she tried to drive once, and it scared her to death, so she didn’t do it any more... even though she could have had lessons. But like I said, I think after a year she was kind of biding her time and was really looking forward to coming back. She wasn’t miserable.” “I think it was harder for her. Well... I guess because I was... you know, most of my time I spent at work, and in that sense there was... one, there was a group of people that spoke English, some from America that I could relate to and discuss things with. And two, the people that I worked with, the [local people], were making an effort to accommodate and see how they could be useful, and so in some sense I felt more welcome than my wife because she didn’t work right away, and where we lived... we didn’t live in an area where there were a lot of expatriates. So she kind of felt isolated for a while. Like... she never got comfortable driving there for example ‘cause... the way they drive (laughs) , and the conditions of the roads, so she kind of felt isolated a lot, but I mean, eventually she got together with people and socialize with them, but it just... I think it was much harder for her because she had to make a lot more effort.” “I was very happy doing my new job and had all this support. She cried to herself in the shower because she just... was so unhappy.”

One wife actually went home after a while because she was not happy in the host country:
“Yes, she found it difficult. And as soon as she found out we were having grand-kids she was gone. She’s not an outgoing person. And I think she does not make friends easily even in the U.S.. - So, she wanted to be home with the grandchildren? - Yes, she said ‘If I’m going to be...’, and then I travel all the time in my job, so she said ‘If I’m gonna be alone, at least I wanna be alone at home where I can see our kids and the grand-kid’. I can’t blame her.”

Children in general did not have any big problems adjusting. Most of them got used to the new food eventually and even learned to speak the language of the host country. No obvious relationship between spousal adjustment and adjustment of the working expatriate could be found. And none of the expats went home earlier because of the problems their partner had. Although occasionally statements were made like:
“I think I did worry about my wife, because it was harder on her. If it would have been just me, it wouldn’t have been that much of an issue.”

There is a slight tendency for spouses who were originally from the same region as the country of assignment of the working expatriate to facilitate certain aspects of adjustment, or at

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least integration with host nationals. In cases where the accompanying spouse was a national of the home country, it occasionally hindered the integration with locals, as for example: “I was more welcome than I wanted to. I was invited to more than I wanted to join because I had a family”. The next section will examine a few human resource practices in connection with expatriate assignments.

4.3 The HR Practices as they are Experienced by the Expats
4.3.1 General

In general the expatriates appear to be quite happy with the expatriate process and the way it was handled by their companies (N=15), only five said the company could have done a better job. A person who seemed to be very satisfied described his experience in the following way:
“Yes. The whole thing, yeah, it was… quite good, it was very… stress less. It was very easy to do… And in fact, the repatriation process, I think I got even more support coming home than I did going. The company there was very good about making sure I had boxes and shipping stuff, and… you know, sending people over to help pack stuff. So, coming back was even easier, but I knew that I could always call Paul36 and… you know, the folks here and say I need help in doing this and that’.”

Others who were not completely satisfied said:
“From my business point of view, I would say yes, it was pretty good. I think international HR needs help… could be run much better, they could do a much better job.” “Yes, for the most part. It’s always a bit difficult to understand all the things that are gonna happen and what your needs are, so you have to trust them to meet those… There were some things that were a little less complete than they would have been if the company had been to [name of country] before.” “Well, I mean, it’s so much better than when it started. There was nothing. I mean they didn’t care about anything when I was in [name of country]. I had inadequate furniture in my house and ended up living there for months without even a couch that I could sit on. There was no… no… even thought about my safety and how I traveled. I just had to use the taxis, which was the most dangerous way to travel. They didn’t start forming policies and procedures that helped. So… you know, yes, they’ve come down the path, but… there’s always room for improvement. And they always wanna take the cheapest way.”

When asked what had been missing, or what could have been done better, they mentioned things like the repatriation, the lack of international experience of the management and HR at headquarters, the cultural preparation, and the overall planning of the assignment:

36

Name changed

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“The only thing where they fall down is… they fall down in getting people back into the company after they come back, because there’s no guarantee of a job. If you do find a job, they really aren’t good about… at utilizing that experience that you’ve had abroad.” “Working with international HR wasn’t always a pleasant experience. One specific thing that I can say about that, is... if any company’s international HR department included people who had an expat experience, everything would be a lot better for everybody. Part of the reason why it was frustrating was, I felt like I was dealing with bureaucrats who were sitting in corporate headquarters dishing out rules who had no, absolutely no idea what it’s like to be an expat. - None of them ever was an expat? - They were... I don’t think they’ve ever been outside the state of Washington, to be honest with you. So that is a big, big problem.” “I think they could have had some cultural familiarization courses, I think they could have… you know, there are standards…, they have an international assignment handbook which sets the standards for expatriation benefits, and the management tailors them to each country based on a person going to that country and doing some research. And I think that was done very poorly with [name of country], and apparently it was because the person that was out there, it was like his first time. And the problem was really that… we wasted a lot of company’s money on things that… if somebody had been more careful or hired an in-country consultant on it, we could have saved the company a lot of money.” “I think the assignment needs to be clearly addressed, and the duration of stay would be another one. And maybe reporting to a higher up management, so that I don’t frequently change, that’s another one. Three would be preparing for the assignment… would be another one.”

Next, we are going to look at three individual HR practices in more detail, as there are: the selection procedure, cross-cultural training and preparation, and the performance evaluation.

4.3.2

Selection

How were the expatriates selected for their assignments? A little bit more than half of them (N=11) volunteered to go, and the other nine were asked by the management. Only five respondents said they had gone through a formal selection process, in three quarters of the cases it was a rather informal process with only very little pre-screening. The following statement shows how little planning and preparation sometimes is involved in the selection of an appropriate candidate:
“Yeah, it was kind of accidental, there were several people with expertise with that equipment. People had been rotating over there and doing this assignment, and one of them had come back and wasn’t able to go on the next. They had a very short window, two weeks for the next slot. There was really nobody else available, plus I had my passport already, the visa. Well, they were kind of rotating different people, and it just came up they couldn’t really fill in the person they planned on, and... others weren’t really available, so it was just kind of... kind of accidental.”

Two people who were asked by their managers to go on an assignment said:
“Actually I was not gonna take another assignment after my time in [country X]... because it was so bad.... but... they kept pursuing me because they needed someone with operational experience to come over and teach how to run an operation, so I... I relented.” “I think I can say I was hand-picked. I was chosen directly. Not much of a selection process. You get a phone call one day, like: ‘Hey, you wanna go?’ And I said yes.”

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The following two statements were made by people who came up with the idea themselves:
“I basically had an idea that I presented to my manager, and he agreed with that idea, and he got his boss to agree as well. The idea... the proposal I had... I think everybody saw a need for it. And they saw me as the most... the best candidate for that assignment.” “I said ‘I’d been doing this job for three years, I’m bored. Let me... let’s go out and try some other things’. […] So when the suggestion was made ‘You guys are having this problem, how about Jack37 coming over and helping?’, they were like ‘Great, yeah, have him come over please’. That’s all it was. It was very informal.”

And the next quote serves as an example for one of the rare cases where there was a formal selection procedure:
“Yes, it was a very involved process. The typical, you apply for a job, so you submit a résumé, and then... I did an initial phone interview with an executive recruiter. Then did an interview with the hiring manager, an interview with the site manager which is the overseas expatriate manager, I did an interview with the vice president of international assignments here as well as the VP of the division of international back here, took a psychological profile exam, uuhhm, there was the interview with [name of HR person]. So I believe there were nine interviews total, the psychological profile, and the medical examination. Fairly complicated. It took a long time, about four months.”

As to the selection criteria that were used, technical expertise seems to be by far the most common criterion. This finding is not surprising, since it matches the results of previous studies, as discussed in Chapter 2. Table 8 shows which criteria were used in how many cases.38
Selection criteria Previous experience Technical skills Soft skills Cross-cultural skills Number of respondents 5 15 6 5

Table 8: Selection criteria

Regarding the soft skills and cultural sensitivity, those characteristics were usually determined in a very informal way, simply by talking to the candidate. Only one out of the seven companies has a formal psychological profile test in place. Often it is just more or less assumed that the candidate has these necessary characteristics. This finding is not really surprising either, when compared to the results of previous studies. Usually there are no real formal selection criteria applied — at least not any that the candidates know of — but it is a more or less informal procedure. The following statement shows the problems that can arise when no cultural pre-screening is done in the selection:

37 38

Name changed Note: Often more than one criterion was applied.

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“That was one of the challenges I had as I got there, and most of the people that were already on the ground had no pre-screening, no check to see if they were culturally sensitive or if they would be successful in a foreign assignment. That was... we ended up having... I sent home a large majority of people right after..., you know, people would come and think they might stay for two or three years. As soon as we got the network built I sent them home, because... you know, they weren’t happy, they weren’t culturally sensitive, there was this ‘We’ll show them, we’ll do it our way, they’ll never learn...’. I mean, you had all these mindsets, and I just got these people home. Sent them home as quickly as possible. And it wasn’t... never one... that the company wasn’t happy. But I said ‘Listen, you know, we just have to get them out of here because they’re doing more harm than good’. And then from that point forward, any foreign national, whether they were currently an employee of the company or just anyone else, from any place in the world, we did a lot more screening and development of understanding their cultural way.”

In eleven cases, there were one or more interviews with the candidate, and nine respondents said there had been no interviews at all or only informal talks instead of actual interviews. The people who did go through interviews though usually talked to a series of people — the number of interviewers ranging from two to nine, and the average seems to be approximately three to four. The candidate’s family situation is hardly ever a selection criterion. Only in one case, the spouse was interviewed as well as the candidate:
“My wife was interviewed as well; we were interviewed together... to talk about the change..., the culture shock. That was part of the program. It’s also... a self-selection type of tool where the counselor brings up things that often occur in expat assignments. Helps people think about what they’re going to go through, what they’re going to give up. Make sure they consider these things before they make a final decision.”

This is rather surprising, when compared to the relevant literature. It was stated in section 2.2.1 above that for management type positions, about half of the U.S. companies conducted interviews with the candidates’ spouses as well. The following three statements are answers to the question to what extent the family situation was given consideration in the selection process, and they stand for many other similar answers:
“No, I don’t think it was. I think it was strictly based on... their effort was to find out who the best candidate was for the job... regardless of their family situation. And then once they picked the person, then they became concerned with the family situation...[...]. If there was anything that was asked about it might have been the spouse’s employment. - Did they ask if your wife was working? - They may have, I don’t remember that. I think they may have asked if my wife had a job here that would be difficult for her to leave. - And was she working here before? - No, no. So for me it wasn’t an issue.” “I think my original conversation with the CEO when he asked me..., I told him that it was necessary that she was willing too. Apart from that, nobody else asked. They assumed that she was coming with me, unless I was getting divorced. - But they didn’t ask directly? - Well, the other six, I mean the other six people other than the CEO, they were more interested in getting to know me.” “No, not in the selection process. Once I was selected, I had to... I had an opportunity to back out if my personal circumstances were such that I could not accept the offer.”

Usually, somebody did ask about the family, but in no case this appears to have been an important criterion for selection. In certain cases, it was not even asked during the interview process if the candidate and family were willing to go on the assignment:

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“I think it was more like an assignment than a question of asking if someone would like to go. It was more like... I was working on this product, and it is now located to China, so I moved over there.” “That wasn’t really part of the interview.” “I don’t remember if they asked. I think they did ask, I think I did get that question. But I don’t know if that was a basis for selection.”

As some of the spouses were rather unhappy in the host country, it would definitely make sense to invest some more time in interviewing and preparing the spouses as well, in order to find out if they are really willing and ready to live in a foreign country.

4.3.3

Training

Rather surprisingly, in more than half of the cases (N=11) there was no training offered at all by the company. One person said training had been offered, but he did not do any of it. Three declined some of the training that was offered and took part of it, and five people made use of all the training that was provided. Seven respondents took language lessons, but two of them had to find the language teacher on their own and in one case, the employee had to pay for the language lessons himself. Five people did some cross-cultural training; in all cases, this was provided by the company. As to the timing of the training, one person only had pre-departure training, three had only post-arrival courses, and four had both. The duration of the cultural training was always between one and five days, language training was sometimes over a longer period of time. In five cases, the spouses were included in the training. Four people mentioned they had been on a look-and-see visit to the country of assignment, as part of the preparation, and six said they had prepared themselves by reading books and other material about the particular country. Table 9 shows the reasons for the lack of training or the declination of part of the training that was offered. Note: One person can mention several reasons.

Reason No time Not necessary Short-term assignment Don’t know why

Number of respondents 6 9 2 1

Table 9: Reasons for lack of training

More often than not, both language and cultural training is perceived by the expatriates as not very helpful. Not one person said the adjustment had been easier for him or his family because of the training they had had — which is not really surprising, when compared for ex-

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ample with the study conducted by Harvey in 1997, which showed that many expatriates were not satisfied with the training. And no obvious connection could be found between training and self-assessed success of the assignment or between training and any aspect of adjustment. What does seem to help though is self-preparation. Several people mentioned they had read books about the particular country before they had gone there and that had helped them in terms of being prepared for cultural differences and understanding them. The following quotes are typical statements about the (lack of) helpfulness of company-provided training:
“They did offer some language training, my wife and I took a week-long course in Chinese, but it really wasn’t much value. At the time we thought it was, but it ended up not being.” “Aahh... there was a little information, like a sheet of paper, something... I can’t remember what was on it. It was pretty brief and irrelevant, whatever it was.” “Yes. Not very good, but yeah. Oooh, they had some lady […] from some cross-cultural company, they had an indigenous Chinese person […] drive down from Canada. But, man I tell you… in my opinion, none of that stuff helps until you actually get there. - It wasn’t helpful? - No, it wasn’t. I couldn’t pull anything from the noise they shared with me. Could have bought a book and read the same thing. Still wouldn’t have helped. Not if you’re gonna go and spend a long-term assignment, no. - Was it not enough information, or wrong information? - No, it’s just completely different, ‘cause the people from mainland China are completely different from Chinese people from Taiwan, or Singapore, or Malaysia.” “Did you find the training helpful? - I did, but I’d already been there like six weeks or eight weeks by the time I did it. So it was... for the most part, I had already had figured most of it out. And most of the stuff they told me... my team mates, at the time had already shared most of it with me.”

Apart from the general lack of usefulness, another frequently stated problem is the timing. Frequently the candidates did not have enough time to do all the training that was offered, or they would have preferred the training days to be spread out over a longer period of time instead of having five days in a row. Others said they would have preferred pre-departure training, but that was not offered, or they did not have time before they went abroad. Not one person said there had been anything like a needs assessment before the training, in terms of asking the candidates what kind of training they would prefer, and when they would like to have it. This matches the finding of Selmer’s 2000 study, for instance. The training provided by MNCs is usually a standard language or cultural course, not tailored to the requirements of the individual expats, as recommended by Tung’s contingency approach that was introduced in section 2.3.2 above.
“I had the opportunity to have a cross-cultural training, I had the opportunity to take language lessons, but that was useless. - Did you take the language lessons? - I took it. I took a... one day offered by the company, and that was through [name of training company]. And this was a... what we call intensive course where they... you know, they’re holding up an object, and they’re speaking to you in [the foreign language] the whole day. I don’t learn that way very well. [...] Well, they had offered five days, but the method and the timing... when are you gonna take five days in a row? That was impossible with our work schedule. And the method of learning didn’t suit me very well. So I did actually on my own take lessons from an individual teacher, more what I call the old style,

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you know, with textbook, ... and did that for about two to three months. So, you know, I gained forty usable words, I learned how to curse and count, and that’s about all. - Was that offered by the company? - No, I did that for myself. But the five days through [name of training company] was offered and paid for by the company. That’s a standard.”

There are several reasons why in many cases there was no training offered, which can be illustrated by the following quotes:
“Not so much for Australia. I think there’s a belief that it’s an English speaking country, so it should be the same (laughs). In that sense, it’s really a misnomer. It is a different culture. And I did a lot on my own, I read every book there was about the history of Australia, and the convicts, and how the country was founded and all that.” “I cannot say that there was. I know that there generally is, but in my case, it was a quick, fast, and a hurry kind of thing, and we did not step through that.” “They did offer for us to have more cultural training and counseling for our children and all that. We just felt it wasn’t necessary. We had experience. We just felt... the family knew what to expect.”

Since there really seems to be no connection between cultural training and adjustment, the effectiveness of such training can be doubted. At least for this sample, it cannot be said that training helps in any way. The person who made the following statement did receive cultural training but believed that no training whatsoever can really prepare you for the culture shock:
“I mean, this is one of those things you learn on an expatriate assignment, especially to Asia. There’s absolutely no preparation that can help you. The culture’s completely different. You’re kind of dropped at the deep end of a pool, and if you can’t swim...”

When asked about the language classes they took, although several people had made the effort to learn at least some basic language, hardly anybody seemed to have learned the foreign language well enough to hold a real conversation, at least not by Swiss standards. When a Swiss person spends a longer period of time abroad, the main thing he or she usually learns is the language. Business is not conducted in Swiss German elsewhere — and usually not in High German either. Therefore, Swiss people are forced to actually speak the foreign language in the work setting, and if not the language of the host country, they have to at least be able to speak English, French, or some other common language. It would definitely be interesting to conduct a similar study with expatriates from various European or Asian countries and compare the results with the ones from the present study. The supposition would be that people from non-English speaking countries gained better language skills during their international assignments. Sixteen respondents said they had been well prepared for whatever culture shock there might have been in the host country, and only four felt they had been left on their own. Not everybody was prepared by the company though, as the following quotes show:

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“I felt it was my responsibility, I’m a mature person, I certainly wasn’t looking for things to be provided. Part of adjusting well to a situation like that is taking it upon yourself to make the adjustment. Because there were other people there..., part of our group there was to some extent a support structure. I took it upon myself to be ready to deal with things. There are resources within the company for helping people... counseling resources available... if you’re struggling, having problems.” “I would say..., the fact that..., when we went to Asia, we were sort of prepared. We knew what to expect, because it was our second assignment, so we already knew. But that was not because of anything the company did, it was just our experience that made us well prepared.” “I was prepared what culture shock would be. I mean the... the mechanics of what happens. But I was certainly left on my own to deal with it.” “Oh, I was not prepared, no. Not by the company.”

As to the question of realistic job preview, a majority said they had had a pretty realistic expectation of their jobs (N=13). The remaining seven respondents found their overseas jobs to be quite different from what they had expected:
“I think it was as realistic as the managers knew it was gonna be. The site manager and my direct manager there had both just been there several... a few weeks, when I came over, so I don’t think they fully understood what they were there to do yet. So, we were all evolving as the job evolved and we all understood what we were there to do better. - What was different compared to the job preview? - They thought that the changes... the list of things they wanted done and the setting up of these new processes would be... we’d walk in and say ‘here’s what the process is gonna be, do it’. And everybody would go and do it. And I don’t think they realized there’d be so much resistance to change. So with all these processes, there was a lot of resistance, and I don’t think the site manager and the hiring manager knew that it was gonna be that difficult.” “See, we ended up doing something completely different. The way it would have started out and what I initially went over there for, you know, didn’t change and I did do some work on that. It just happened that I uncovered some other things... got into some other things... and kind of started setting my own direction... that was very different from what we initially visualized.” “It was completely different. What I went to train them on, they basically already knew. And I figured that out about the second day I was there. [...] And on that second side of things, that’s where there were some real serious problems. And that’s what I ended up working on. And mainly that was a problem of communication between the departments of the company. So that’s what I really worked on while I was there. But that wasn’t really too well understood by [name of company]. You mean, by headquarters here? - Right. - Didn’t they understand the problems that were involved, or what do you mean? - No, I don’t think so. I don’t think they understand them today.”

The host workforce was typically not prepared for working for American expatriates, at least not in a formal way. Usually there would be some way of informal preparation though:“I knew they were told that I was coming. They were told of my responsibilities and how they were expected to be supportive.” “The local staff confided to me towards the end that they were very nervous about working for an American boss. Uuhh… they’d heard stories, they had read books, and some of them admitted that they had read books about working for Americans and expatriates, and so they knew what to expect, and so…” “Somewhat... They hadn’t had a lot of experiences with Americans. I don’t really think anything was done on their side to prepare them to deal with the American invasion. But... my experience was that people in Europe are much more culturally adoptable... because of the exposure to multiple cultures they see in Europe and you don’t see here... and the size of the countries. It varied from person to person.”

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Only in one case, this proved to be a little bit of a problem:
“Absolutely not. - Did anybody tell them how it would be like to work for an American? - No. Well, it was a combination of being an American and being black. It was just... I was too much for them to deal with, it took them time to make all these adjustments. The irony is... their concept of a black person is a professional athlete, so... - All black people are athletes? That’s what they think? Pretty much. In their eyes. At first, they were very skeptical of my abilities. They were more interested in playing recreational basketball with me.”

4.3.4

Performance Evaluation

Three quarters of the respondents (N=15) said that the same performance appraisal procedure as applied in the parent company had been used in evaluating their performance as an expatriate. A minority of two people said there had been a modified procedure, and the remaining three had no evaluation whatsoever during their international assignments. Not all the companies seem to have recognized the special challenges the expatriates had to face. The following statement was given by a person who did have a modified procedure applied to him:
“It was modified. - In what way? - I think we were... we were given... it was recognized that we had additional challenges, for example... just communicating back to the head offices... time changes... you know, we would make phone calls early in the morning or late at night from home. A lot of our customers worked on Saturdays, so we ended up doing some things on Saturday. We traveled a lot... way more than we would over here. So those things were all recognized and taken into consideration for bonuses or compensation in general.”

In certain cases, employees were confronted with a completely new system because the old system had been changed, or because they had not been evaluated under the same system while they had been working abroad, as the following quotes show:
“Was the difficulty of working in a foreign culture given any consideration? - No. - Do you think that would have... that was needed? - Yes. Uhm... and interesting that the performance evaluation procedure here in the United States had changed, and I was unaware of it. Uhm... so I ended up kind of caught in that last year in between two systems, and that was very, very bad. At the end of a year to be told ‘Oh, we don’t do it that way anymore’. If you’re gonna have an evaluation system you need to know at the beginning of the year what you’re gonna be evaluated on. - So they changed the expectations or the standards? - They changed the standards, the system, the forms, everything, and I was not aware of it. There again, that was one of the things nobody told me. I was out there all on my own, you know. So uhm... it wasn’t that... for no other reason that it’s just uncomfortable to have a whole new system thrown at you, and the year’s already over with. So it was quite a shock, I went ‘What? When did this happen? Oh really?’ (laughs).” “But [name] as a company has a very meticulously defined performance evaluation system that I’m now trying to learn, because I’m going to be subject to it.” “I was evaluated by someone out of the [name of place] office who had no idea what the hell she was doing. So it was a very different procedure. She had never done it before. She had been in country about two months, three months, really didn’t know what was going on. So it was really awkward, very weird, not a good experience.”

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Although the procedure itself often seems to be the same as the one applied at headquarters, just over more than half of the interviewees (N=11) believe that the difficulties of having to work in a foreign country had been considered in some way or other.
“When I left I had... you know, the statement of work, and then it was reviewed there with the site manager with the challenges that we met there. But then, upon return, there was another one based on what we were doing here. It kind of... some of the day-to-day challenges weren’t evaluated, it was much more objective. The one when I got back was much more objective. ‘Did you do this? Yes or no? And if no: why?’ There it was much more ‘Ohh, I know you didn’t do it this way, because it was...’ you know, they had a lot more background information.” “All the goals that we set up around the performance were always based on being in a foreign country. So they were part of the evaluation process, but I wouldn’t say that there was anything special about them. The goals were set up to accomplish tasks, and the tasks were based on where I was. So it was part of the whole process.” “Was your performance actually appraised against those goals from the work statement? - Yes. It was, and... setting up the process, you know, setting up the work process was done, so... it wasn’t clear... they didn’t necessarily know all the work associated with it. When I sat down with the manager and the site manager, I kind of said ‘Here’s what I’ve done to obtain this goal’. And so I made sure they had visibility to it.” “Well, because it was done by our president in Taiwan, I think yes, probably. But was it compared? I mean, do I know people who got an equally high rating doing a much lesser job in the U.S.? He just compared it with what he’d assigned us to do. So, actual consideration about doing this in China I don’t think is really there.”

As can be seen from these statements, it is often difficult for people at headquarters to fully appreciate what the expatriates are doing abroad, and what challenges they have to face there, especially if the top management at headquarters does not have much international experience. Several interviewees commented on this lack of experience, but no numbers are available to confirm or dispute these statements, since interviews were only conducted with the expatriates, and not with their managers or people from HR. As will be seen in section 4.4.2.3 below, the communication within the company is often somewhat lacking. The expatriates felt they were not always given a lot of information from headquarters, which immediately suggests that communication from the foreign branch back to headquarters might not be all that great either. Again, there are no facts available to the author about whether or not management at the parent company was well informed about their expatriates. In order to have more information on this aspect, interviews with people at headquarters would have to be conducted. What can be said though is that several interviewees mentioned they did not believe management at home really knew what they had been doing abroad, and the reason for that was that they had never worked abroad themselves:
“Oh absolutely, I’m a much more valuable employee. The question is..., it’s hard..., in both companies, none of the most senior people have ever done it. So what you see..., from my experience, if you look at the companies that are best at this, the most senior people have worked out of the country themselves. And then they can appreciate what you gain from it. [...] There is..., even though

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they intellectually know the value, unless you’ve experienced it yourself, it’s very difficult to put a high value on it. Versus putting a high value on somebody that has the same experiences as you have.”

The next question was about individual performance goals. Half of the interviewees said there had been individual goals for them before they went on the assignment (N=10), in two cases the expatriates knew the overall business goals, but here had been no individual goals set for them. And the remaining eight said there had been only informal goals or no goals whatsoever relating to their assignments. An example of a person with a clear list of goals can be found in the following statement:
“They gave me a list of ten to twelve objectives that I was to accomplish and... clearly laid out and specified. And that was all that I was to focus on. And then there were other things that came up that we had to negotiate into the list.”

A person who had quite the opposite experience said:
“Uhm... - Did you know what the company expected you to do there? - Not really. So as things changed, the situation changed, the company changed and pulled me to adapt to a new situation as they needed.”

When asked if these goals were clear, the answer would usually be “The goals were clear, but...”. This can be illustrated by the following statements:
“Uhm... the goals were clear. What was ambiguous was... or even we were not informed of was the... all the other things that get into the way, you know, working day to day. You know, on the one hand there is a list of objectives... review management and evaluate teams... you know, hard objectives. But there weren’t any considerations for the coaching and mentoring or the amount of planning... that that company does. I mean, it’s their cultural way. And... the sheer amount of meetings that they held... that got in the way if you really wanted to focus on your objectives. And that was not considered overall. You think, okay, here’s my list, I’m gonna go and get that done. It’s just so much more outside of the list of objectives.” “They were very clear, but very high-level, so it was something such as ‘Set up a process for managing IT work’. Well, that’s pretty clear what they want: a process to manage IT work, but... the trouble is with the details, and the 500 things that had to be done to satisfy that. And... one of my concerns was that they wouldn’t recognize all this work associated with that one sentence, it was a lot of work to make that happen.” “There were clear goals, but the question was if the goals were realistic? Some pieces were, some were not.”

Half of the respondents said they had been evaluated by another expatriate there at the local branch (N=9), seven were evaluated by the parent company, and three were subject to the performance evaluation of the local company. The standards for their work were usually set by the parent company (N=11), in six cases they were set by the local branch, and three interviewees said the standards had been set by both the parent and the local company together. Rather surprisingly, often there was only one person who evaluated the performance of the

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expatriate (N=10), in seven cases there was one rater responsible, but that person had feedback from others. And in only two cases, there were several raters appointed. The interviewees were also asked if they knew how expatriate success was evaluated by their company. Almost three quarters (N=14) answered that they did not know if their superiors thought it had been a success or not. Two said there had been an informal acknowledgment of their success, but never a clear statement as to why they were considered successful. Four said their superiors had told them their assignment had been considered a success, but only two of them were also able to say how that success was defined by company officials. Some typical answers to this question would be:
“I would say that no one back here had a real view of my performance. It was all local.” “Nobody at the end of this whole thing said ‘Chris39 was out there for six years and he did alright’.” “Like I said, my manager didn’t know what I was doing over there.” “See, the thing is…, there’s this situation where one department has some objectives abroad. And then they’re borrowing, they don’t have the expertise, so they’re borrowing some expertise from different departments, so there’s a little bit of a disconnection there. [...] So, that’s why I think there’s not a lot of planning ahead of time or discussion or engagement of the employee. It’s not considered a strategic priority. - You mean the supplier development? - Yes. Supplier development is not, and therefore these kinds of assignments that have that task are not given a lot of priority. They could do a lot better.” “I have no idea. I have no idea. No one else has ever talked to me about it. But the need at the end for a download or a closure... I have no idea. - So you don’t know if they think it was a success for the company or not? - My part of it, no I don’t. I know how they feel about the financial parts of it. But my part of it, no. No one’s ever said a word. And that again is very common with the other group I was talking about. They have the same feelings. Nobody ever sat down with them and said ‘Okay, this is how we saw it from here’. That didn’t happen. […] What a huge miss this is for the companies. I’d love to take this on as my project... to really…, you know, you offer this phenomenal opportunity to someone, and you send them out there, and they go do... whatever, and they come back and they feel like they’re almost a failure, because nobody gives a damn what they did.” “I don’t think they have any tracking that I know of. I mean, other than if you sent someone home early, they may say this was not successful, but I don’t know, I haven’t seen anything.”

The person who made this last statement is in a rather high management position, and surely, he would know if there was any evaluation of success. The next quote is an example of one of the rare cases where the success of the assignment was clearly defined and communicated to the expat:
“Well, yeah, it’s a combination of the success of the actual assignment and how well you interacted with the locals. So it’s the two. That’s why on my assessment I had... my boss who was a U.S. expatriate and two of the Chinese senior management who also worked with me on a regular basis.”

The two people who stated there had been an informal acknowledgment of their success said:

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Name changed

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“Not in particular. I think they... I don’t think the answer is no. No one said anything about ‘Oh I’m glad we had you go to [country X]’, but their reliance on my experience, and their... they’ve really done a lot to include me in everything that has to with [country X] in a recognition of my experience over there. And so I’d say their actions have been very much a yes. They way they’ve acted. And that’s again why I’d say that the [country Y] and [country X] situations were very different. When I came back from [country Y], there was no indication that anyone really cared that much about what I’d done in [country Y]. Coming back from [country X] was a totally different experience.” “They didn’t come out using the word success, but you could define that by... conversations. They appreciate what you did there.”

After the international assignment is over, the expatriates have to be brought back home. The next paragraphs discuss some of the problems that may occur during the repatriation.

4.4 Repatriation, Future Career
4.4.1 The Difficulties of Coming Home

It was already mentioned in section 2.7 of the literature review that coming home is definitely more difficult than some people might expect. And you don’t necessarily have to be gone for a very long time, but especially people who really got involved with the local culture in the host country found it rather difficult to come back to America, as this one person for example:
“[...] and people always said ‘you weren’t gone that long’. But I said ‘I really got into the culture when I was there’, so coming back, it was kind of..., it was quite a shock.”

Twelve out of 20 respondents experienced quite a big amount of reverse culture shock, three had some minor problems, and five had no problems at all coming back. These experiences can best be described by quotes. The following statement is from a person who found it particularly difficult because he had been gone so long:
“Yes. Extreme, extreme. I’ve been away for so long, it’s changed. I’m from Seattle originally. And Seattle for one has changed a lot over the years. Just the... the day-to-day life, the attitudes of people, shopping, commuting, you know, driving a car vs. taking the train, everything was so different to come back to, and I’m still not well adjusted. I’m still... I was more comfortable there than I am now here. And I’m often thinking ‘Did I make the right decision to come back?’. [...] But the adjustment coming back has been very difficult... both living-wise and work-wise.”

In many cases, these problems were not anticipated by the repatriates:
“Yes. I never thought that would happen. But it definitely was.” “We were really caught unaware and unprepared for the amount of work it takes to... to set up again back home. [...] A lot of work. I did not anticipate that. After all, we were going back home.”

One person who only went back to America for a very short time and then left for another international assignment said:

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“Well, actually even in those two weeks in the office I did. The company had changed so much. [...] To see the change and how bureaucratic and slow it had become was a huge shock. And... like I said, I don’t think I can go back there to work. It would be... between [country A] and [country B] I spent about six weeks in the office, and I was absolutely bored to tears... because of the way we had to work and how slow everything worked. I’m used to..., now I’m used to being the one that makes the decision, but I’m actually now experiencing the same thing here because we have so much connection to the domestic network, and this has been a big frustration point... something that makes this job harder. You can’t make a decision, you got 87 other people that need to be involved in the process. So that’s hard.”

Some had problems coming back to their job, while others found the non-work readjustment to the U.S. more problematic:
“Yeah, yeah, it was kind of depressing. Well, I had a really great job there, and I came back to a really boring one here.” “Yeheess, definitely! You get really used to being over there and having different kinds of people, different cultures and all that. It’s just... you know, it’s just different. [...] So... you know, not so much the work environment. The work environment was a little bit more similar, but the... the social interaction and that stuff is really a big difference.”

Overall, nine repatriates found changes both work-wise and in their private lives, five found that mainly the work-environment was different, one person found the biggest changes had been in the non-work life, and the remaining five said they had experienced no changes at all.
“On the personal side, uhm... you know, it’s realizing with close friends that their worlds haven’t changed at all, and you feel like your world has changed so much. You’ve seen things and learned things from the other side of the fence, and there’s almost this feeling that, you know, they haven’t grown or changed at all in three years time. And you feel like you have, tremendously (laughs). Finding a place again in the social part of your life, you know, I had some friends who got divorced while I was gone. And in my own family, we had a death in the family while I was gone.” “There’s a lot of what I call Seattle things that have disappeared, been replaced by... by franchise organizations. You know, what happened to the little coffee shops of Seattle? Why were they turned into Starbucks, and Tully’s, and Seattle’s Best Coffee? Those kinds of things were different when I came back.” “Well, when you are gone from your work and your work group for three and a half years, people change, the way they work as a group changes, technology changes, the support group that was there when I left was gone. New people. I noticed that the pace of work changed... it was much faster.” “Work side you feel like an outsider. Almost three years being gone in a company like [name], a lot has changed. Coming back to work in this building where I worked before I left..., so many strangers, people I’ve never seen before, people who don’t know me, and I don’t know them. And reacclimating myself to my networking... who does what now... within these walls? Who’s responsible for certain things? Who do I go to when I need something? All those people have changed. Things around here change quickly, so there’s a... almost a three-year gap in my education.”

Coming back home can be disillusioning because people might think they can slip right back into their previous life, but maybe that life does not exist anymore: “I wanted to come back to the routine I left, but it’s not there”. In one of the previous articles (Hurn 1999), the repatriation was described as “the toughest assignment of all” — and it really is. For some people it was almost like going on another international assignment to a new country that feels strange

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and foreign at first: “There were a lot of changes coming back. Almost as significant as going over”. Several repatriates had problems understanding the U.S. politics and the current president when they came back home:
“One of the things that’s affected me greatly in terms of my culture shock in coming back here is the whole situation with our government... and what’s going on with Iraq... to see it up close. Because over there, I mean, I’m an American, it’s part of me, but I’m distant from it, I don’t have the barrage of news every day... you’re kind of separate from it. Here you’re right back in the middle of it, and I don’t like it. I’m not happy with what my government’s doing, I’m very frustrated, I’m almost at a point where I could become Japanese, I could give up my American citizenship and become Japanese. I’m just very, very down about that. And that kind of taints my overall view to... you know, we’ve come back, and that’s been going on since we’ve been back.” “The U.S. politics seem very strange and weird to me.”

Most of them felt welcome when they came back home, but not everybody did. Especially at their company, some people did not feel particularly welcome:
“They didn’t bother to say ‘thank you for the job you did in [country X]’. And quite frankly, it was such a tremendous job, it was a huge, huge, huge project, and it went quite well.” “Uhhm... the company is kind of indifferent, I think, really.”

Quite frequently, the repatriates found it difficult to talk about their experiences with other people back at home, especially if these people had never been abroad themselves. Seven out of 20 had experiences like the following:
“People who knew us well and made the effort to travel and visited us, in Europe or in Asia, were much more understanding. People who were friends and never took that opportunity that they could have perhaps come and seen us, they were much more ‘Well, you’re back now, become who you were. Go back to who you were before’.” “Uhm... it’s interesting, some people who love to travel and have either been expatriates themselves or worked in other countries, or... like people in our international department, yes. Other people, no. I mean, it’s ‘Hey, it’s nice to see you, glad to see you’re home’, but hardly any questions about ‘How was it? What did you do there? What were the people like?’. Very few. [...] But the people... sometimes people surprise you, people that you think would be fascinated by it don’t ask a word. [...] It’s interesting, and sometimes you kind of wanna stop people and say ‘Hey, you wanna hear about what I learned or what happened or...’ because sometimes you feel that question’s not asked enough, especially business-wise.” “I find it quite difficult though to talk about my experiences because people can’t identify with it. Some of them had never left the U.S., so if I try to tell them about what we experienced there, after five minutes they don’t care to hear about it anymore.” “People that you interact with or meet, they’re polite to begin with ‘Oh, you’re new, you’ve lived some place else, blah blah blah’. But very quickly they get tired. They don’t care, and if you’re talking about foreign travel, they misinterpret that that you’re bragging.”

Thirteen of the returnees received no debriefing by company officials upon return, two were debriefed by their managers, another two by someone from the HR department, and only one person mentioned debriefings by both managers and HR representatives. This seems to be one

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of the main areas where improvement is required, since all but one of the repatriates found that a debriefing is something that should be done by the company. Most of the people who did not receive a debriefing seemed to be feeling very strongly about that. This finding seems to be consistent with the results of previous studies, as introduced in Chapter 2.
“Do you think that would have been helpful? - Yes. I do. I think that’s one huge missing step. I think it’s a necessary step, and in talking with other people that we have done this with in [name of company], it’s their missing step also. They feel very… ‘I’ve got all this information, and all this experience I want to debrief with someone that can listen to the good, the bad, and the ugly and take that experience and learn from it, so that next time around they don’t make those mistakes. Or we do the right things right again’. [...] There was no... there should be some type of place to let go of... you know, ‘for three years I was out there all by myself, where the hell were you when I needed this or I needed that’, and we all had the same feeling. […] It was a wonderful opportunity, but it’s a huge gap, it makes you feel like... ‘What did I do all this for? Do you appreciate what I did? Do you realize what I did?’ And I think the answer is no, they don’t. I really don’t think they do.” “Not from HR, I think it would have been a good idea, but they didn’t do that.” “The answer is simply: not one question by my sponsoring managers or human resources, they were not interested in the work I was doing or what I thought about the experience.” “You should have seen my first trip back. - After the first assignment? - Yeah. - How was it then? Ohoo god, I walked in and my Vice President said ‘Oh, you’re back? Go find a cube somewhere, try to find one’. That was it. That was it.”

Almost half of the respondents (N=9) described the readjustment to their previous lifestyle back in the home country as very easy, six of them are leading a rather different lifestyle now after the assignment, and five said there had been some difficulties readjusting.
“I did some adapting to my previous life, but I also took it as an opportunity to kind of start a new life almost, and took on to saying ‘well, that was pre-assignment, and now there’s kind of postassignment’. And I looked at things a little bit differently.” “No, I think it’s challenging. Because you’re just different. You know, we’re not European, we’re not Asian, we’re not American, we’re much more global at this point, you know.” “It was easy, but I would say it was not as easy as we thought it would be.”

The following section will analyze how an expatriate assignment fits in with the overall career path.

4.4.2

Expatriate Assignments and Career Paths

4.4.2.1

General Findings

In general, it can be said that the findings of previous empirical studies are clearly confirmed by this sample of repatriates. An overseas assignment is (in practically all the cases) consid-

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ered useful for the internal career40 and personal development of the employee, but not necessarily helpful for advancing within the organization though. Everybody in this small sample claimed to have learned to understand other cultures, broadened their perspectives, and came to understand that the American way is not the only way. Most of them integrated more or less with the local people and made some friends in the host country. Many improved their communication, understanding, and listening skills, and also gained a better understanding of how business is conducted in various countries. They all acquired some new skills and brought new ideas back home. During the interview, the repatriates were asked to describe in their own words how their expatriate assignment fits in with their overall career path. Here is a selection of their answers:
“I guess as the corporate career path, maybe it didn’t fit so well because [name of company] is organized around product lines and general, administrative type of jobs like the two that I had overseas, in Japan and China were... were not particularly on a well-defined career path within [name of company]. For me personally, in what I wanted in the company they fit very well because my interest has always been international, and in particular Asia [...]. And so, I don’t mind, and I... you know, I think it’s been a good career for me, although it wasn’t probably... necessarily a welldefined career path within the company.” “Well, you know, I think I have developed a lot. I think the company is actually..., and not just myself, but every single one of us that has been over there has gained a wealth of experience we wouldn’t have got in the United States that could bring fresh ideas and different perspectives into the company. I think they’re missing out on a good thing.” “I think that in this industry, it really..., it’s really hard to say. Because there are always joint ventures. And so it’s unlike being on an assignment for a true multinational. So it doesn’t really..., it gave me skills, but there’s no joint venture to run in North America. So, many of the skills are not usable, or they don’t wanna be applied because they will say ‘It’s not what we need you to do. We need you to do this now, it’s great that you did ABC in Europe or ABC in Asia, but now that you’re in the U.S., we need you to do XYZ’. So there isn’t..., in both of these companies it wasn’t as it is in some multinational companies where... if you’re ever going to become a senior executive, you must do that. You must have a successful expatriate assignment because we run a global business. Both of the companies that I worked for were basically..., they weren’t global businesses. And actually both ended up getting out of the international business. So, the companies..., you know, continuing to be international is not part of the strategy of the company. So it really is a..., not a significant piece.” “Ok, one aspect is that in general [name of company] supports and recommends for their employees that, if an opportunity arises, they take an international assignment, because they are trying to be a global company, so even for... They want even that their people that are in America have some sensitivity and experience with other cultures... to kind of broaden their outlook and horizons. So, one is it fits in with the [name of company] recommended development path, so there is that aspect. And from a career standpoint, given that I’m in management, I think it was useful in developing my organizational abilities, in terms of understanding how organizations work and what works or doesn’t work in the organizational structure, how relating to people is important. So, being put into a very different environment and trying to improve that and having gained some results, that is obviously good for my career, being able to say ‘Hey, I did this for the company’.”

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cf. section 2.7.1

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Obviously, certain companies do have the intention to send their employees abroad to gain broader perspectives and a global business understanding. The question is: Do they really value those skills and utilize them when the expats come back to the parent company?
“I have no idea really. My current job right now has really nothing to do with Japan. And that’s a big disappointment to me, because that’s where my strengths are, that’s where my experience is and my interest is, that’s where I can add the most value. And I have nothing to do with Japan right now. I’m a [name of job]. And... it’s work I can do, but it’s not necessarily work that I’m really keen on, interested in. So... it’s frustrating for me... that I’m not able to use those skills. My overall career aspirations were to be working in a company that would allow my family and myself to go back and forth. But now I’ve come back, and now I’m kind of distant from Japan, I’m not... I’ve kind of fallen off my career path objective right now.” “The very first assignment was part of... at the time [name of company] had a strategy to have a large international as part of their future. Again, by the end of the assignment, the company had changed its mind about international (laughs)... and decided that international wasn’t part of their strategy.”

About one quarter of the respondents mentioned they did not take on the expatriate assignment as part of their career path and with the intention to climb the corporate ladder:
“Well, the reason for me to do this assignment and others was because that is the kind of work I like to do. It has never been done with the intention of this being a step for career development. It was more a matter of focusing on and using my energy for the kind of work I want to do.”

4.4.2.2

Corporate Career Development Activities

Do the Pacific Northwest MNCs help their employees with career planning? The responses here lead to the conclusion that certain companies could do much better in this area. The numerical distribution of the answers is shown in Table 10.
Corporate career development activities Yes No/little help, would have liked more Not necessary at my level/retired Don’t need any help with that Number of respondents 8 7 3 2

Table 10: Corporate career development activities

Again, it is the perceived organizational support that seems to be most important. The company-instituted career planning does not necessarily have to help climbing the career ladder, but “it would at least make me feel like they care”, as one person said. Two other people who were not very happy with the company help in this area stated:
“We have things called individual direction setting or something like that; we have career paths that we lay out. But it’s one thing to lay out a plan, it’s another thing to follow the plan (laughs). Do you find it helpful, this career planning? - You know, I’d have to say it hasn’t been that helpful, because... in my case we had a plan, we made some significant personal decisions based on that plan, and then the company made some decisions that seemed to totally ignore that plan. And so for

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me personally and for my family it was almost... the plan was meaningless. And that was a bit of a negative thing…, not a bit, that was negative (laughs).” “Uhm... supposedly they do. - Supposedly? - Yeah. We have a yearly meeting with a manager and discuss these things, but I don’t know, I don’t think it’s very effective. But I’m not sure if that kind of thing can be very effective. I don’t see any impact of it.”

In some cases, there is career counseling, but it is not related to an expatriate assignment, as for instance:
“Do you find that helpful? - Uuhh... I do, but, because of my background... I have had an international assignment... they don’t plan for something like that, because it’s... so few people actually experience it, so... I kind of do my own career planning based on where I wanna go and do the research to figure out what I need to do to... to fulfill that.”

The following quote is an example of somebody who found the career counseling provided by the company very helpful:
“Yes, absolutely. My manager wants to know where I wanna be in five years, he wants to know what my plan is for the following year. And also, he wants to know what is my plan with my life, my personal goals, what do you wanna do? How can he support me in my personal goals? My personal goal is to complete my degree in Chinese language, my sinology degree at the University of Washington, and actually go to the university in China, so... if it’s possible. My manager’s already given me the approval to take a leave of absence to go to the university. No pay, but I still have a job when I come back. - Do you find it helpful, the way they do the career planning? - Yeah, very... very accommodating. I think it’s very... I like the company’s attitude towards helping us. Every employee who wants to go to school receives support from the management.”

At a certain level, career planning may not be of much help any longer:
“At my level, I’m not sure how applicable it would be inside the company, I mean, at this point, I’m a senior Vice President, and so it’s all relative at this point. It’s much more about relationships than it is about doing X, Y, and Z.”

Usually, there does not seem to be a lot of long-term planning, and hardly any expatriate in this sample appears to have been aware of the long-term employment prospects in connection with their expatriate assignment.

4.4.2.3

Communication within the Company

Another aspect that might be relevant in this context is: To what degree do companies keep in touch with their employees while they are on foreign postings? Exactly half of the 20 respondents said there had always been a lot of information from the company (N=10). The others felt that they had missed a great deal of information. Four of them said they also had to make an effort themselves to stay informed. Only one person felt he actually had been better informed while on assignment than before or after:
“I was still fairly well connected, knew what was going on. And in fact, in some cases, got more information there than would get here, uuhh... being informed about decision, high-level decision-

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making processes, that here we wouldn’t know about, but there, they thought it was important to people.”

People who were less happy with the communication made statements like:
“No. You’re completely on your own out there. You’re on a completely different e-mail system. Yeah, it’s like, you work for Swissair and I work for United, it’s completely different.” “There’s a lot of small stuff that goes on that you’re not tied into.” “[…] you’re gone, you’re on an assignment. You know, pretty much out of sight, out of mind.” “Your communication was probably more like rumors.” “No. - Did they send you any e-mails or anything? - No. - Maybe your former co-workers? - Some. - But no official communication? - No. See the other thing is... I was on loan from one department to another, so the department I was on loan from didn’t know anything about working abroad, and the department I was on loan to which managed the work abroad knew nothing about me. So, between the two, there was no formal communication.”

This lack of communication might be a reason for the often quite unsuccessful repatriation, as will be discussed in the next sections.

4.4.2.4

Corporate Repatriation Policy

Half of the respondents in general had a positive view on their company’s repatriation policy (N=10). Seven made clearly negative statements, and three had mixed feelings. Quite frequently, the repatriates feel that they were let down by the company upon return. As to the individual repatriation policies, see Table 11 for a numerical distribution of the answers.
Repatration policy A job is guaranteed Return to the previous job Nothing is promised, no job guaranteed Company helped me finding something They give you time to find a job upon return I knew I wouldn’t work for the company anymore Not a clear policy, a lot was unclear Expect the same job level upon return Was sure to find a job somewhere, not worried Number of respondents 3 3 3 3 2 2 2 1 1

Table 11: Repatriation policy

Not everybody was guaranteed a job after the overseas assignment, and there was only one person who felt that for the expats there was actually more job security than for the other employees who stayed at home.
“Did they tell you, before you came back, what job you were coming back to? - Yes. I started a dialogue with my boss, you know, well before I came back. This is one of these areas where in general [name of company]... besides just your local boss, they have a senior manager that is more of a

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sponsor. It’s somebody that’s supposed to be worried about you and make sure you have a position when you come back. They have a policy, you have to come back to at least a comparable position. It may not be in the same area, but at least at the same level in the company. They have a very detailed plan in terms of... you know, providing you with temporary housing and making sure that you have money and things like that when you make the transition. They make it as painless as possible, both going in and coming back. [...] Because of the fact that the company does guarantee a position when you come back, there was more security than I had when... you know, we’re going through a lot of restructurings and things like that.”

Other people who had a rather positive view of the company’s repatriation policy said:
“No one ever promised us anything, going or coming. And... most of us view that as a good thing... in terms of... in the fact that... you know, if you do a good job, if you work hard and you’re smart and all the other things, then you’re going to be retained. But, you know, nothing’s guaranteed.” “I knew what I would be doing about three months before my return. Company management was helpful in placing me, and did eventually find something I was interested in. The company does have a commitment to place returning expats in a job upon return, but the fact is that local management has to deal with the realities of budgets and headcounts.” “Yes, it was clearly defined, you knew going in, that you wouldn’t get your old job back necessarily. And... they were pretty clear on that... there is a possibility that you wouldn’t have a job when you came back. They actually had a very good program in place. They gave you six months of salary to find a new job inside the company, and if you weren’t able to, they gave you another six months of severance. So basically you got a year pay, uuhh... if you were to come back and not find a job. However, I don’t. I had no problem coming back, in fact I came back to a higher level job than when I left.” “I knew that... getting more and more deeply involved with the subsidiary company that I would definitely have a place somewhere in the world with this company... which I do. And I always knew that, that was never a worry for me.”

Of course, not everybody was so lucky, and repatriation is in fact the area where most criticisms were made by the interviewees.
“I knew when I came back that my job would be to find a job within the company, and that I would be working temporarily on some projects in the meantime. So that’s all that I knew. And most... most of the time that I’ve been back, it’s been my own networking and talking to other people within the company to look for what’s available. [...] I know that there’s some people that were brought back that it’s been a very painful process, a very long process, and a lack of understanding from the people here... how much your expatriate experience... counts for, I guess, as far as experience, uhm, you know, they kind of look at it as if you’ve just been gone.” “[…] it was very hard to find a job to come back to. And... first I didn’t have a job. I came back first without a job to come back to. - But did they help you looking for a job? - They did. But again, they said there’s no guarantee. And their help wasn’t... wasn’t all that great. I think they probably could have done more perhaps to get me... my résumé exposed throughout the company. But... that didn’t happen.” “No. There is not a... there is a policy about how you come back and the nuts and bolts of doing it. How you get moved, who takes care of what costs, those particular aspects. So there is no worry about... you know, is the mover showing up to bring my belongings back, am I gonna be able to get through customs and immigration, those kinds of things were all taken care of... and quite well. The aspects about the career, about the job, in my case were not handled very well... at all. I came back, knowing what my position was […], and held that position all along. So that’s no change. But what I was actually gonna work on, who I was gonna work with... none of that was very well defined. As a matter of fact, the day I showed up, they expected I knew more information than I did. [...] - You

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mean, you would have liked more information before you came back? - I would have liked to have very clear choices on what I am to do, rather than being assigned.” “This is a particularly good question, because I think I had... I didn’t know how to answer your question, because... it’s two different questions. “Clear” is a different question from “credible” (laughs). It’s pretty clear. There’s a written policy, there’s some procedures, there’s some things the company gives you, they offer a [name of training company] training class ... about repatriation. So, that’s pretty clear, and that’s pretty good. But credible is a different story. I think it’s very inconsistent. I think that it is... can be... kind of hit-and-miss. Yeah, it to some degree matters who you talk to on the phone, whether they’re having a good day or a bad day, you know, whether they remember to tell you something or they forget, or... You know, to give you a very simple example: When I came back, they didn’t offer me or set up for me the repatriation with [name of training company]. It was simply forgotten. [...] And I had... I started to feel a little bit of... a little unhappiness in the office personally. After about three months of being back, it kind of hit a little bit of a loose button. And I remembered, suddenly, what happened to this? We were supposed to have some repatriation training. [...] And that happens all the time. We all have stories of where they should have done something for you, or they should have explained something to you, and they didn’t. So, I think it’s there, but it’s... it’s not always applied as universally as it should be.”

Very few people said that there had been a formal repatriation training upon return. And, as the following quote shows, these programs were not really all that helpful either:
“They did offer, and I did take a [name of training company] course in... I guess readapting to your home culture after you get back. It was okay. I felt guilty because I felt it was very expensive and I don’t think that I personally got all that much out of it. The person was very intelligent, highly qualified, she was a social psychologist, but I don’t think it was... well, I guess it would just be okay. - So it didn’t help a lot? - In my case, no. - How long was the course? - It was a day. So I think it might have been nicer to have... it was a full day, rather to have it maybe little by little over a longer period of time.... would have been, I think, a more useful way to do that. [...] I was kind of hesitant to do it, and I kept putting it off and I was thinking ‘Ooh, well, I don’t think it’s gonna help me all that much’, but then I was feeling sooo... and I still am messed up in terms of... culture shock. And I thought ‘Well... I’ll give it a try’. And I think maybe it helped a little bit, but it really didn’t give me the kind of help that I think... well, maybe I’m beyond help, I don’t know (laughs).”

Usually there is not much long-term planning concerning the expatriates’ careers. Often they are sent abroad without knowing the long-term career impacts of this assignment or what job they would come back to afterwards. Because there seems to be not much planning in advance, it is often difficult to find a suitable job for the repatriates where their knowledge and experience can be utilized. These findings clearly confirm the results of previous studies, as discussed in section 2.7.1.

4.4.2.5

Job upon Repatriation

It was already mentioned earlier in this chapter that, in general, the companies are very good at helping with practical things (e.g. moving people overseas and bringing them back home). However, repatriation includes more than just shipping goods back to the U.S., organizing visas, and finding an apartment for someone. Those people also want to find an interesting job upon return and would like to feel that the management actually values their experiences.

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“No, I’d say the mechanics of repatriation are quite well established. How you move someone, and what you pay, and all of that is very well established and well administered. What needs work is the career side of it.”

Eighty percent of the repatriates in this sample did not have a promotion upon return, which again matches the findings of previous studies, as discussed in Chapter 2. Some were actually demoted when they come back and feel rather unhappy in their new job now:
“No. No. I think, in fact, I probably have less responsibility now than I had when I was in Hong Kong.” “No. I’m still working on temporary projects, so…, no I’m not happy with it, I am bored to death. And I’m still looking for another position within the company.” “No way! (laughs) - Yes, you said you have less responsibility now? - Much less. Can’t even make a decision.” “On the work side in both situations..., coming back to a situation where having been a Chief Operating Officer or having been the president of the company, and then coming back to having a smaller scale of responsibilities… Maybe it’s a bigger number of employees or a bigger amount of revenue, but the breadth of what you’re doing in terms of your involvement in all aspects of running the company is probably the biggest single adjustment. [...] In most American companies, they expect you to be a functional specialist. And you’re forced to be a generalist many times when you go on an international assignment. [...] So when you come back after your assignment, you know, your job is in sales, or your job is in marketing, and then you say ‘Hey, have you thought about this?’, people look at you and they say ‘Well, that’s not your job’. So, you know, so there’s a sense that you have to really adjust back into a smaller size shoe.”

On the other hand, when asked if the expatriate assignment was good or bad for their career, 14 interviewees said it had helped them in some way or other:
“Oh, it was excellent. - In what way does it help? - Uhm... definitely a global awareness... as our company operates in so many different countries, it’s good to have a different perspective... to the U.S.-centric. That’s probably the most. There’s also the networking, you meet a lot of people that also move through different countries.” “We do need... we really need to work globally, our company is a global company. Until you’ve actually done a foreign service assignment, you don’t really appreciate the difficulties of working with host country nationals. Even though I intellectually understood that, until you live it it’s hard. And so... when you bring that back, it certainly helps the linkage back and forth. It helps, you know, the team to be more effective. So, it’s a good thing from a company standpoint.” “Yes, very. The analogy I can draw is like getting a graduate degree. Nobody can ever take it away from you. You have it, you can hang it on the wall, you can tell everybody for the rest of your life you have one. So I have that experience of living and working overseas.” “That’s maybe one of the other benefits with the expatriate assignment... some visibility, there’s a heightened visibility to the management. [...] I would say there is visibility to your career... that can gain you support. I wouldn’t say that it necessarily gained me support, but it was a heightened visibility. If you did an excellent work on a job it would have been more likely to be noticed.”

This last statement is particularly interesting, since most of the other people actually had quite a contradictory experience, they feel there is less visibility, as for example:
“Well, it helps me as far as what I know, and how to do a job. It probably hindered me because I’m no longer on the radar screen of the local market, and the company does nothing to market the experience that you’ve got. And you’re just disconnected somewhat.”

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Other people who felt the expatriate assignment had not helped their career said:
“No, I wouldn’t say it helped me for my career within [name of company]. I just say it’s been a career that personally I liked. (laughs) No, I’d say... for general career paths within [name of company], international assignments are typically not a positive thing. Say, if for example, your career goals... you want to be Vice President of a particular division, going overseas has not been a thing that has helped people reach that goal. Again, I guess I’d say…, we haven’t done... as a corporation we haven’t done as good as we could have taken advantage of international experience.” “For my domestic career? I would say they were bad. Because you would have been better off staying domestically and building relationships with people in the domestic organization, because international was not a core part of the business strategy. So, I gained wonderful skills and everything else, what I lost out on was the relationship-building with senior people who would make decisions... going forward. So, because you were out of country, even... no matter how successful you were, you weren’t there day-to-day, building the personal relationships with the more senior executives. [...] So, in this company, and in my previous company, clearly there was no long-term benefit of that.” “I would say in terms of career it’s... in this company... that kind of assignment... is more career limiting. Well... it depends on how you define ‘help with your career’. It doesn’t necessarily lead to promotion because of the lack of visibility with those that make promotion decisions. But if you think of career development in terms of learning, broadening of skills and competencies... yes.”

The repatriates are not always able to use the skills they have acquired abroad in their new jobs. Table 12 show the numerical distribution of the answers for those who still work at the same company. Note: One person can mention more than one type of skills.
Use of new skills None Technical, work-related General cultural understanding Specifically related to the country of assignment Personal, soft skills (e.g. communication) Number of respondents 4 7 2 3 10

Table 12: Use of new skills

As this table illustrates very clearly, a minority of repatriates are actually put in a position that relates specifically to the country where he or she served as an expatriate.
“Certainly knowledge of China is... I mean, that’s all I do now is work on strategy for [name of company] in Asia and particularly in China. So I’d say the company’s made very good use of the knowledge that I gained while I was in China. You know, I mentioned that coming back to this job was very well planned. I would say that this has been a model of how [name of company] should repatriate people. Have their next position planned well in advance, and take advantage of what they learned in Asia, or I should say anywhere. - Do you think it’s not done so well in other cases? - Yes, I don’t feel, I know (laughs) that there are people who have had expatriate assignments... and the repatriation process did not go well.”

This is one of the aspects where the intrinsic motivation is especially important. People who return from foreign postings want to be able to demonstrate their new skills and show what they have learned abroad. If they do not have a chance to do that, quite frequently they feel

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frustrated in their new job. Again, these findings seem to be rather typical, according to the literature review in Chapter 2.
“Are you able to use the skills you acquired abroad in your new job? - Oh, some always, but not overall, no. I think that’s why I’m so bored.” “No. Not really. It’s the same old stuff, not allowed to be very creative or anything, because we’re working with the domestic market, and they’re so process- and procedure-driven that they can’t get out of their own way.”

The following quotes provide some examples of how the repatriates can use their newly acquired skills in their jobs back at home:
“Personal skills: yes, in the sense that I’m for example much more confident about dealing with Chinese nationals than I was before.” “It’s more a kind of soft skills, because it’s... I’ve always been... I think, pretty good at dealing cross-culturally, and you just get more sense of that, having to live there every day for a few years. And that becomes very valuable for being here and teaching people about that, because people... a lot of people tend to be kind of insensitive to certain kind of cultural things. It’s like ‘Wait a second, you don’t understand’. You’re able now to explain it a lot better, ‘cause it’s not always as easy as it seems. And then it helps in dealing with... dealing with Mexico and Brazil. Because you’re just much more sensitized to it.” “Oh yes, oh absolutely. I mean, the biggest skills that you take with you are the people skills. So those people skills are invaluable in any situation, ok. But in terms of the other skills I built, in terms of investor relation, structuring financing deals, you know, the broader sets of skills, they’re basically..., you’re being told ‘That’s not your job. Your job is..., you’re running this part of the company, it’s sales and marketing, you know, stay focused on those aspects of the business’.” “I learned to deal with difficult people. Customers and other employees. One of the biggest things that you learn when you go working in China, the biggest thing that you learn is patience. Because they don’t measure time on the same scale as we measure time. They don’t measure urgency the same way we measure urgency. So you have to become extremely, extremely patient.”

The goal of the next question was to find out whether the former expatriates think their companies value the experiences they had gained abroad. Everybody was sure he or she had gained a lot of new skills and knowledge, but not in all the cases did they also feel their employers were aware of this. Seven out of 20 gave a negative answer to the question if they believed they were a more valuable employee for the company now.
“I firmly believe they do not value the experience that is acquired over there. They don’t recognize any of the achievements you made in foreign countries... You know, a lot of companies..., when you take a foreign assignment and come back, you’re promoted up to the next position. You know, they actually have planned ahead. There is no planning [...]” “Oh yes, much more. They may not recognize that, but they are getting a lot of advantages..., a broader perspective. - Do you think they do not recognize it? - Uhm... well, some do, some don’t. It depends on the individual manager. I don’t think that overall... [name of company] is not overall organized to draw in knowledge and expertise from external persons. They tend to look at it as if

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they’re giving knowledge to other companies. But, that was probably valid twenty years ago, but now I think they’re potentially gaining more than they’re giving.”41 “Oh yeah. They’re not gaining the value out of it though. They’re missing it. I think I mentioned this, they could... I could be adding a lot more value to the company if I were in a role relating directly to Japan.”

One person who was sent on two assignments for the same company had two very different experiences upon return:
“Yes, certainly. No question. Because of what I’m doing now. I mean, now we see some big opportunities in [country B], and so the company values that experience. The [country A] assignment... I would have answered that differently. I felt like I gained some useful knowledge that could have been a value to the company when I was in [country A], but there was almost no attempt to take advantage of that knowledge. I came back into a job that had nothing to do with [country A], and for three years I did work that had nothing to do with [country A], and so I felt like... at that time there was no attempt at all to take advantage of that experience.”

Some people are frustrated to the point where they actually think about leaving their firm because they feel their experience is not being valued by their managers. A total of four people in this sample is either thinking about leaving their company or has left this or a previous company after an international assignment. One international HR person said that, unfortunately, many expats leave the company upon return because it is so hard to offer them a good job that suits their needs and matches their new abilities. Very frequently, it is just not possible to find something for them. A person who is thinking about leaving the company said:
“Are any more international assignments planned for the future? - No. - But would you like to go again? - Yes, I would. - With this company or maybe with another company? - Uhm... it doesn’t matter really. I just wanna go. If it happens with this company, great. If it doesn’t, it’ll happen with another company, I mean, I would have to leave... basically. I’m kind of at the point right now where I’m... like I’m treading water in this job. But if I don’t get back to work relating to [country of assignment] fairly soon... I need to look elsewhere.”

As already mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, most expatriates have a larger amount of responsibility on their overseas posting compared to the job at home, and of course when they come back, it is quite hard sometimes to get used to having less responsibility again.
“And I’ll be frankly honest, going over there to Taiwan and being given the level of responsibilities that I was given there, really showed me more of my capabilities and more desires I have for myself professionally [...]”

When asked if they would like to go on another assignment, 15 out of 20 said there was nothing planned yet but they would like to go. Only four said they would not like to go again, and he last person is retired now. Usually people who were very happy in the country of assignment want to go again sometime.

41

This person was not working at a wholly owned subsidiary, but with a partner company in the host country.

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“So all around I believe we came out ahead. So, I’d say very successful, that’s why I say I’d like to do it again. Had it been a failure... It seems to me that most expats I’ve known either hated it, hated their experience and never want to leave America again, or they loved it and they want to go back again. And a lot of people we knew in Japan had gone on multiple expatriate assignments. You either love it or you hate it, there’s seldom people who seem to be in the middle.”

It might not be quite that black and white, but three of the four people who don’t want to go on another assignment were not all that well adjusted in the host country or did not feel really comfortable there. The fourth person wants to stay at home right now for family reasons, but might consider another assignment in the future.
“Would you like to go again? - Not really, not a long-term assignment. I mean, I still travel, go to Japan and Scotland occasionally or other places, but I am not looking for another assignment. Why not? - Aahh... I enjoy it here. The amount of disposable income people have over there was substantially smaller. And you don’t really appreciate that until you’re over there. [...] So, we’ve been pretty fortunate over here, and I guess I enjoyed coming back to that.” “Would you like to go again? - No. - Why not? - Well, I’ve been doing this... I’ve been on five long-term assignments, international assignments, for ten years total. One of the disadvantages of having international assignments is that you have to put your life on hold. And... so it’s a personal decision. I would like to settle down now.”

A bit less than half of the respondents (N=8) seemed to be not very happy or even unhappy with their own repatriation experiences. One person who was quite unhappy with the whole process said:
“Quite frankly, I don’t know... [...], I don’t think I could go back to the United States and work there. And part of that is... because I did have so much autonomy. And I had a role that had a tremendous amount of responsibility compared to anything I could go back to in the United States. My role..., my responsibility was probably larger than any Vice President in the United States. But at the home company I was not even recognized as a Vice President, I was a director. So there was no recognition of accomplishment.”

The following person was sent on another international assignment afterwards, and talking about his next job, he said:
“Oh God, I tell you, my first six months I worked about eighteen hours a day, I was by myself, there was no one else, and I got nothing done. I didn’t get a sense of accomplishment. It’s extremely hard, it’s extremely political, it’s extremely corrupt, the work ethic is not existent, never do today what you can possibly do next month. The way we’re structured it is very difficult to work, because this is so much closer to home, there’s a lot more involvement from the home team, there’s no autonomy, there’s no decision-making..., it’s a huge step back.”

Several questions relating to the interviewees’ personal opinion about their expatriate experiences and their feelings and attitudes will be discussed in the next section.

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4.5 The Expatriates’ Feelings and Attitudes
4.5.1 General Attitude and Motivation to go Abroad

Generally, one can say that all the 20 interviewees in this sample had a rather positive attitude toward their expatriate experiences as a whole; no one said it had been a negative experience. The reasons why they enjoyed it though varied from person to person. Some commented on the interesting job they had had, others mentioned the friends they had made or the interesting things they had learned about other cultures. One person described his attitude toward his status as an expatriate in the following way:
“In Asia, if you’re a director or above, you are, you know, like royalty, and you’re given all of these... these perks... and so and so forth. You know, what a benefit it is to be at that level, man. And I don’t know if I’ll ever attain that level again, here or elsewhere, but uuhh..., it’s certainly something to shoot for. I thoroughly enjoyed it. [...] You were privileged to have such an opportunity... in every sense of the word.”

When asked if there had been any negative things they remembered, two people commented on other Americans they had met there who were not so sensitive to cultural differences, the so-called “Ugly Americans”, as is illustrated by the following quotes:
“Ugly Americans. - People that you met there? - Yeah. Embarrassing people that just... just... people can look at that one person, and they make a judgment of all people and they say ‘Yeah, see? See? Didn’t I tell you?’. So, there are people out there that... the company did not do... does not do a good job at screening. [...] When you go somewhere as an expatriate, you don’t create enemies... by taking these ugly Americans and reporting them. You just have to be very, very diplomatic about your relationships with these people. So it’s kind of dirty. And that’s the only negative thing I can say, having to put up with those people.”42 “[…] they sent some temporary people down there... that just... you know, they come in with an attitude that you can do it exactly like you do it in the U.S.... or exactly like you do it wherever they come from. And they’re only gonna be there two or three months, and they cause more harm than good. […] They were sent to do a job, and they really didn’t have the time to acclimate themselves, they were just trying to fill shoes while we recruited a new person for that position.”

Another person, although very satisfied with the experience per se, thought there were some negative consequences on the career aspect:
“From a negative standpoint, having invested eight of the last nine years in doing that, and it’s obviously helped my career to where it is. But it’s not..., most likely gonna help my career go to the next step. I mean, at least in the current situation, I mean, I got a great career, and I love this company, and I’m happy. But it’s just..., it’s not..., it’s gonna be something that I have to make work for me vs. the company saying ‘We know this person has those skills, so therefore we’ll use those skills’. It’s really..., you know, people don’t’ really know what skills I have.”

42

“The Ugly American” is the title of a bestselling book about tragic American blunders abroad. The term stands for American arrogance, incompetence, and corruption in other countries. It is a kind of a caricature of a loud, uncultured, unsophisticated, arrogant and insensitive person that is oblivious to the subtleties of high culture.

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The interviewees were also asked what their original motivation had been to go overseas in the first place. Table 13 provides an overview on the various reasons that were mentioned.
Motivation Interest in other cultures/travel Career/job reasons Challenge, adventure Good opportunity for the family Recommended by a friend Accidentally Escape from bad marriage Felt obligated to go there Number of respondents 12 7 6 3 3 1 1 1

Table 13: Motivation to go abroad

As Table 13 and the following statements show, the motivations varied greatly between the individual persons. Some took the assignment primarily because they were interested in that particular country or in foreign cultures in general:
“I fell in love with Japan. I really like it there. I’m comfortable there, I can do well there, I thrive in that atmosphere, my wife’s Japanese, her family’s there [...]” “I think just to experience a different culture and to... I think to be actually immersed, because that’s more powerful than just visiting on a short-term basis. To learn how to grocery shop, and to pay your bills, and banking...”

Others also mentioned career or job reasons:
“Ok, my personal reasons were that... one, it sounded like an opportunity for me to progress professionally in terms of going into areas that I hadn’t been before, and trying my management skills in an environment where I had not direct control over the people, so kind of practice leadership. [...]” “[...] And partially because of the challenges that I was facing in my job upon repatriation, again, being under-utilized in my skill sets, and here was an opportunity... a bigger opportunity from that perspective, and to really use the skills that I had effectively.”

Yet others mentioned that they had been looking for adventures or were escaping personal problems at home:
“Just for... the operational and the international experience, and the adventure part of it as well. ‘Cause I’ve always loved to travel. That was kind of funny being over there. Even though I probably worked harder than I ever worked in my entire life, I felt like being on a three year vacation... which was really cool.” “A lot of not very good reasons. The overriding one is that’s where the work was going. And that’s always what I’ve done, go where the work is. And the second is probably... made it much easier... I was in a bad marriage, and I was going through a divorce, for good or bad, and it’s an easy escape from having to deal with that every day. [...]”

The following three statements were made by people who went on their foreign postings more or less accidentally; they were not specifically looking for an overseas assignment:

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“I went over there because my company, the parent company asked me to. So it was just a part of the job. I felt obligated to do it.” “I was looking to make a career change, from doing one thing to another. And there was this opportunity. If the opportunity had been available locally, I probably would not have gone over there, if there had been an equivalent opportunity available.” “Uhm... you know, I just... I had to do international assignments for a while. - Why did you like going on international assignments? Why did you go to so many places? - Well, I think I just kind of fell into it. I never had the ambition to see the world. It just happened, yes, I fell into it.”

The interviewees were also asked if there was anything they would do differently if they had the chance to go to the same place again. Table 14 shows the most frequent answers. Note: One person can mention more than one item.
Things they would do differently Nothing Language Travel more Housing situation Preparation Work-related things Understand company strategy better Save more money for the company, do things cheaper Be more patient Number of respondents 8 4 3 2 1 1 1 1 1

Table 14: Things they would do differently

The following quotes provide some illustrative examples for these answers:
“I spent too much time doing those things which weren’t necessarily important. I could have spent more time doing things that had a bigger payoff for me personally as well as for the company.” “Sure, there are lots of things that I would do differently. You’re older and wiser, so some of the choices you make, mistakes that you make in terms of how you approach some early decisions... I just think that being aware that..., again, understanding..., the company that you’re going for..., what they’re strategy is about... needing internationalists. You know, do they value internationalists or not? Understanding that would be one of the big things on the job side. Before I took an assignment with another company, or with this company, which is probably not likely, you would really need to understand... the role that you would play.” “Yeah, I would be a little more patient going into it. The way they measure patience... I was very impatient, I was very American. Really what it was is I wanted to get the project done.” “I’d make more effort to learn the language.”

Next, it will be discussed how the expatriates were feeling while they were working abroad, which country and company they felt they belonged to.

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4.5.2

Attitude toward the Country and Company

It was already discussed in section 4.2.2 that the majority of the expatriates in this sample still identified with their home country (see Table 5), although quite a large number said they had gained a better understanding for the host culture and were able and willing to adjust to other ways of doing things, e.g. to have more patience, and so forth. The following quotes provide some examples of people who identified very much with the U.S.:
“I would say the U.S. culture. Every time anybody from here goes over there would be like... would make me feel like ‘Hey, a little something I can relate to again’.” “I think I always identified more with the U.S. culture. Very often, the adjustments that were made around work were adjustments to fit me, rather than me to fit them. They appreciated it, being able to work and speak in English; they wanted to know about how we work and how we did things.” “[...] if you like your home country at all... I think generally you will find that you like it even more... when you’re abroad. You have more... I don’t want to say patriotism. But you certainly, you know, especially when you are from the United States, you... feel a sense of pride... and stronger because, you know, you belong to the United States of America.”

The next statements will show that this feeling of patriotism or pride is not shared by all the expatriates though — some actually felt quite the opposite way.
“I started to identify more with the [local people]. Uhm... I did very much so. I got very... And I think, having been there through September 11 and George Bush who I don’t like at all, I think he’s horrible, I found myself almost being embarrassed to be an American. And I think that’s very sad. I think Americans have always had a pretty iffy image around the world, and... in the last couple of years I think it’s just been destroyed even more, and I felt... very strongly about that, and started to associate more with the [local people]. Isn’t that funny? I mean, I’m still... I’m an American through and through and always will be, and I love my country, but that doesn’t mean I have to like everything it does.” “So when we were over there, I completely and totally dis-identified, and I hardly ever even came back here, I came back for a couple of meetings and stuff, came back for Christmas and all that. But we really identified with being over there, with being European and British kind of cultures. But the strange thing was being in Madrid on Sept 11 when that attack on the World Trade Center occurred, that was the first time when we were sitting there and I was like..., I felt like ‘Oh I know what that’s like, I’m an American’. You get over there, and you just really get into it and just... you know, I really, really identified with it. And then really, when that happened I was like ‘That’s right, that is my country’. That’s kind of amazing how that happens.”

Some people tried to see the positive aspects in both countries, as for example:
“I’d say it’s a mix, I mean, you’re... you’re clearly an American, you’re clearly not a national. And yet, by living there and working with everyone that is a local person, you become... you know, you gain a greater appreciation for the way they look at things and their point of view, and... so I think it’s a nice mix. You’re always proud to be from your country, but you find many good things in the host country as well.”

As to the loyalty toward the company, four said they had felt loyal to the parent company, eleven felt more loyal to the host company, and five respondents seem to have had dual allegiances to both parent and host company or tried to be a mediator between the two. There are

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several different reasons for feeling more loyal to the host company, which is illustrated by the next few quotes (bold prints added):
“I’d say I felt more loyalty to the local branch, because that was my responsibility. I mean, I was the general manager, and it’s my job to make sure that the people in the head office understand what’s needed in that country. So if you always just told the corporate line and didn’t push the local issues, I don’t think you’d be fulfilling your responsibility.” “Absolutely to the local branch. And that was..., you know, all your compensation, all your incentives, all your bonus, all the success was linked to the local company success. And especially in a joint venture, you know, you have to be committed to the local joint venture, because the home company only owns a minority percentage. There was never any choosing of sides, I did what was best for the local company.” “I took the side with the local company. Being there... we had a unique experience. [Name of company] had a large investment in the company, but didn’t own it, it wasn’t a wholly owned subsidiary. So it was its own company, it had its own set of owners and stockholders and so on. So we were there on the invitation of the ownership there to help them to be better. So really, that’s why we were there, and they paid for me to be there. So it was almost like a consulting position as opposed to a wholly owned subsidiary where you’re definitely there to do something because the parent company wants it done.” “The local branch there. - So, if there was a conflict of interest, would you take their side? - Yes. That’s an easy one (laughs). - Was it often the case? - There’s a lot of pressure from here. And in recent years there’s been a lot of pressure for cost-cutting, and the people back here in many cases they don’t get it. They don’t really understand what it is the people are doing over there. And it’s an expensive place to have an office, you know. Costs are high over there. [...] So that’s kind of frustrating. And... just all the infighting things that went on, and I would always stand up for the office over there, yeah.”

Two excellent examples of dual allegiances are shown by the following statements:
“That’s an interesting question, because what you had to be was completely and totally supportive of the local branch. But part of my... not part of my job, but part of my kind of love for this company and wanting to see it succeed on an overall basis was to getting those guys over there all sort of feeling that ‘You know what? We are one company’. [...] We made them think about Europe as a team. And now we’re making Europe think as [...] part of the global company... that cultural change of an organization is extremely difficult and long. It takes years and years, so... I feel... my ultimate loyalty is to the total company, not even headquarters, to the total company. And any decision... there’s a right and wrong way to decide. And the right way to decide is always what is best for the total company. [...] And that’s not an easy concept to deal with. My loyalties were in both places. - If there had been a case of conflict of interest, parent company vs. local branch, which side would you have taken? Or would you have tried to mediate between the two? - Yeah, absolutely. Because the only way I work is actually with common sense. Forget politics and all this other junk. If you understand, if you truly understand both sides, okay, I understand what this subsidiary’s motivations are and what the parent company’s motivations are, and if you communicate properly, you come to the same.... you come to the right answer. [...]” “Oh boy, that’s a tough one. [...] I think I was incredibly loyal to the [local people], to the people there that were so much a part of me, you know, I recruited and hired and trained most of them. So, many times my loyalty was to them, uhm... gosh, I’ve been around Starbucks for twelve years, if you slit my wrists I’d bleed coffee, not blood, so I’m pretty loyal to the company too.”43

Others tried to mediate between the two companies, which obviously was not always easy:

43

This quote was used with the permission of the interviewee.

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“When I first got there, I didn’t realize that there was... I had no awareness of this conflict, this tension that was going on. But within a week I was aware of it, within a month or so I was extremely well aware of it. And everyday I had something about it. Those of us who were working there as technical advisors, we considered ourselves as marriage counselors between the [name of company] residents and the Chinese representatives that were dealing with foreigners.”

When asked how these attitudes had changed over time, eight out of 20 said they had identified a bit more with the host company, or country, respectively. Some examples are:
“I’d say there was more loyalty to the place where I had the assignment, just because of the fact that... I had a greater appreciation for the challenges they had... so, just from an inherent fairness... equal opportunity to contribute, an equal opportunity to have people develop. The whole purpose we went over there for to try to have a higher morale team over there was to try to get them more autonomy. So the nature of all of that made me for a fair amount loyal to the group there.” “Yeah, it was a big learning. There definitely was a change of “we” and “they”. You really understand and take it under your skin. - So, at the end you felt even more loyal to the local branch? - At the beginning I would say that I wasn’t. I would be more loyal to the home company.”

Others said their attitude had not really changed during the time of their assignment:
“I wouldn’t say... I mean, I didn’t go from one side to the other, but within the time period it went up and down a little bit. I felt less happy with the headquarters at some point, I felt they didn’t understand something and would take sides with the local office, but I think in general... the headquarters had a bigger picture of what needed to happen. The local office is only concerned with their little piece of the world.”

The next questions are somewhat related to this, as the respondents were asked to describe their organizational commitment. Everybody seemed to be rather committed to his or her company in one way or the other:
“Oh yeah, always. - Do you believe in the organization’s goals and values and all that? - Oh very much so. I think that there is something that happens to people from [name of company]. I’m not sure how we do it, but I have an incredible amount of belief in this company, in its mission statement, its guiding principles, they’re very strong, and I really do believe that the difference between us and many other companies I’ve worked for is… people really do try to live by those. For the most part people at the top really try to live that, and… what a difference. I’m incredibly loyal. I believe very much in the way they try to do business.” “I always worked very, very, very hard for this company because I believed it could be a lot better than it was a few years ago… and it is, it is actually and will be a truly great company. But we were… this is all public knowledge in the U.S., we were almost bankrupt basically, it was really, really bad. Very sad shape. And now, we’re doing absolutely fantastically. I always knew that this company had the opportunity to be a ver, very great company. So that was always a very strong motivating factor to work very hard and to bring us to where we are now.” “Did you believe in the organization’s goals? Were you proud of being an employee of that company? - Proud of being a [name of company] employee… I don’t know about that. But I put a lot of effort into my assignment. So maybe I was proud of being a little bit different from the average… From the average [name of company] employee, you mean? - Yeah, trying to assimilate better. Like I said, eight out of ten had definitely a difficult time to assimilate.”

Practically everybody (N=17) also believed very much in his or her mission:
“Yes. The most important thing I’ve ever done for this company was being over there doing the stuff that I did.”

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“Yeah, I did, and I thought that I was… I felt privileged to be asked to do it. Uuhh… it was challenging, and I knew it was challenging going in, so… I think that there were not a lot of people who could have been successful in their roles, so… that was my goal, to be successful.”

A few people appeared to have mixed feelings about this:
“Most of the time. I mentioned earlier that sometimes I would get in the way of other expats. ‘Try to over-manage’ was my term, and I think those were the times when I felt like… my mission wasn’t clear, or I was not doing it right, or could have been designed better, or something.” “Never take my job too seriously (laughs). Well, I helped them do things, and they helped me do things, but can I say I came out there to be a life-saver? No. Could they have done the same thing without me? Might have taken them a little bit longer based on our standards.”

Everybody — without exception — felt committed to his or her particular assignment:
“Yes, oh yes, I worked very hard when I was over there. Especially in the last two and a half years where I… first, in the administrative role it’s kind of hard to measure the results of your effort. But when you’re actually responsible for selling products and satisfying customers, it’s much easier to measure the results. And so I was much more driven and much more satisfied.” “Were you willing to work hard for it? - Oh yes, seven days a week, 24 hours a day, I literally worked seven days a week, constantly, if anything the problem was I worked too much. Incredibly dedicated.”

In six cases, the organizational commitment even grew stronger over time:
“You know, before going over there, it’s... it’s a kind of a... it’s a business objective, and even monetary. You know, if you complete the assignment, you’ll receive a... a bonus. But after you get there and you’re working, then you start to feel more of a... an emotional connection to it. Then it starts to matter more.” “I would say, if anything, more committed, because you get involved in the day-to-day work, ... as you understand the business situation and the business political reality... Yes, I would say, more committed. You have more of a stake, the longer you’re involved. You get to know more people, understand who they are...”

Another four said their commitment had grown weaker:
“I think that I’ve begun to feel a little bit less committed to the company. The company’s changed, all sorts of things, the company itself has changed while I had been abroad. It’s kind of gone from a warm… comfortable place to work for to a colder, more calculating environment. We had a change in our… of leadership, our president’s changed. So, the current president and his predecessor were vastly different… the types of person they are, like the current… this is my own opinion, my own way of seeing it, but I used to think of the past president as kind of like our Dad, the current president is kind of like our high school principal (laughs). I mean that’s kind of an elementary way of putting it, but that’s a definite change. And with that there’s been a change in corporate culture too.” “Well, you know, I say as there were enough frustrations over the course of the assignment that I would say they got weaker.”

The remaining ten said there had been no real changes:
“When you’re starting a company, I mean, it’s like having a baby, it’s your child, you’re building it from the bottom up. The loyalty was there from the beginning and it sustained itself.”

Another question that might be to some extent related to this was whether the expatriates felt that the contributions and inducements had been balanced. Almost three quarters of the re-

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spondents said they had been well balanced (N=14), three thought they had given more than they had received from their company, and another three felt exactly the other way round:
“Well, for the most part I think it was well balanced. Because the expectations were clearly laid out to me before I made the decision to go. And they kept their end of the deal. I would say it was 50:50.” “Uhm... I would say, well, on assignment... I certainly felt that it was balanced. Always a sense that ‘Yeah, you might be giving a little more’, but in general it was balanced. When you’re coming back, expecting that there would be some level of recognition and acknowledgement for it, absolutely it feels like less. Because there was no..., there’s no reward or recognition really at the end in those two companies. You know, I could have ended up in this job, even if I would have stayed in the United States, I would..., it wouldn’t have been any..., I could have got to this level job in the same timeframe, there was no faster advancement, no career benefit from a promotional standpoint. - So, afterwards you’d say that you probably gave more to them? - Absolutely, yeah, you feel you gave more than you got back from the company.” “Actually... uuhh... I think we gave more to the company than we got back, there were some opportunities that our home company... well, that the foreign company wanted to give us and the home company wouldn’t allow us to do. It was a stock option thing. And the home company said ‘No, it’s not fair because the people back home don’t get it’. But, you know, they weren’t away from their family, they didn’t have to work in a foreign environment. So, I felt that was a bit unfair. Actually it was more than unfair because we were actually teaching people that knew nothing that were getting huge stock option grants that were guaranteed to make a lot of money. And we couldn’t participate, yet we were the ones with all the knowledge. - So, you didn’t get them? - No, because it was not allowed by our folks back in America. Because they didn’t get them.” “I would always say that it’s in the company’s favor, they always did more for me... because of all the things they could understand. I think as a whole.... someday when I’m ninety years old, sitting in a nursing home, I have this to come back to, you know, I found my wife, and... so, the value... I definitely was more the receiver.”

It was already mentioned very briefly that a bit more than half of the respondents (N=11) described the organizational culture in their company overall as rather supportive and appreciated the support they received (see section 4.2.3).
“In ways that they would assist me with the problems that I have... working situation and personal. The company takes that upon themselves to make that their... make that a part of their problem as well as mine.” “Yeah, yeah. The big difference is, [name of company] here has 30,000 employees, and the entire organization there had 3,000. So... there... you know, it’s easier for management to know people’s names, and you see people in the hall, and everybody knows everybody, so... Back here, you feel supported just because it’s a big organization with lots of programs. But, you know, some of the personalization... isn’t there. - So, you felt supported by both companies, here and there? - Yes, here and there, yeah. In different ways.”

One of the two people who did not feel they had needed any support made the following statement:
“The company wasn’t overly involved, but I knew if there were ever things I really needed, they would be provided.”

Seven interviewees thought their company could be more supportive, for instance:

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“Hmm... could be better. That isn’t the company’s strongest point (laughs). But individuals, there’s always individuals that strongly support you, but on an overall basis, does the company..., does the face of the company come down and really give you the evidence of support and all that... They compensate you well, but the overall feeling of support isn’t necessarily always there. So that was kind of frustrating me, felt like a bit of lack of support in just the... the administrative stuff. Doing like taxes was an absolute pain... it’s not fun.” “This current company that I’m working for... I would say they say the right words, but it’s..., the actions speak differently than the words. - They promise more...? - They promise more than they keep.” “While we were in [name of country] I don’t think we were supported very well at all. Our leadership team would come to [name of country] for a meeting and not even bother to call any of us and say ‘hello, how are you doing, how are things going, do you need anything, etc.’ I know that it sounds like a small thing, but when you are away from home, any contact with the home office is important. We have a yearly evaluation form that all of us filled out and blasted them about not contacting or caring about those of us out on assignment. They got the message. For about three trips, we would have a breakfast; they would update us, general chitchat, then, back to the same old routine. They did it for two or three trips and then immediately forgot you were over there again. Generally out of sight is out of mind.”

This person is not the only one who mentioned this feeling of being “out of sight, out of mind” — that seems to be a rather common problem among expatriates. The subject that is going to be discussed in the next section is the relationship of the expatriates with other people in the host country, either locals or other expatriates.

4.5.3

Relationship with the Local Staff and with other Expatriates

The repatriates were asked if they had felt welcome by the local staff. Nobody appeared to have had any serious troubles in this area, although in a very few cases the situation was a little bit problematic:
“The situation… I’m sure… caused the local people to be cautious. They had a major investor coming to their company or facility. The company was in financial trouble and went out to find an investor, and we were interested, made the investment.”

Others said after the first few days of nervousness the relationship had been very good:
“Yes, very welcomed by them. On the first day, they… everybody was a little bit nervous… and who’s who, and… the local staff confided to me towards the end that they were very nervous about working for an American boss. Uuhh… they’d heard stories, they had read books, and some of them admitted that they had read books about working for Americans and expatriates, and so they knew what to expect, and so… After a couple of days of nervousness… everybody got along very, very well.”44

There were also situations where the expatriates were actually needed by the locals and therefore very welcome from the first moment:

44

This person actually integrated very much with the local staff and made friends there.

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“Yes. They… it’s one of those situations where they needed the expats to validate their existence. They wanted us there. They needed us there, and they were very helpful.”

The next quote was made by a person who realized how difficult it must have been for the locals to be told by the American expatriates what to do, and how much he appreciated their co-operation and willingness to step aside.
“They did as much as they possibly could do, and sometimes beyond, to make us feel comfortable. And never really intentionally got in the way… or hindered the program. So, in that sense, they were very supportive. There was a director there that I was advising who... I just knew, and I needed to tell him all the time, how much effort he must have had to make to step aside and let a foreigner come in and tell them, and him, that things should be done differently. Must have required so much effort of his part. And I… I let him know that. I told him I didn’t think I could have been that magnanimous, you know, that flexible.”

Expatriates who tend to adapt to the local lifestyle appear to be very welcome by the host workforce:
“I think, the Chinese people themselves, when I got there and started working, were even impressed that I was married to a Japanese or an Asian woman. So that... that even impressed them. They’d say, ‘oh, this guy is into Asia’. Or that I like the food. They were impressed. ‘do you eat Chinese food?’, ‘Oh yes, absolutely. Being from San Francisco, you know...’.”

The next question was a bit trickier. The respondents were asked if they felt that the local staff had trusted them. Especially in Asian countries the concept of trust seems to be quite different from our Western way, therefore it is not so easy to gain an Asian person’s trust. To a lesser degree, this is also a problem in certain European countries. Eleven interviewees made comments similar to the following ones:
“No. And they came right out and said that. That was part of the… the acclamation as they say ‘just because you’re here doesn’t mean… you have the authority to tell us what to do, you have to earn that, you show us that you know what you’re doing, and then we’ll do as you say’. So, as opposed to here, if you’re told I’m your boss, immediately you step into that, you understand. But there, they wanted to be demonstrated that you knew what you were doing. At the beginning, there was little trust. They did not know me and I did not know them. They just knew that I was there to change they way they work. There was also a cultural component at work here also. In the Taiwanese culture, trust is earned, not just bestowed on someone because of title. [...] To answer your question it only took about two or three weeks to establish a working level of trust, as time progressed the trust level increased. By the end of the six months I do not believe trust was an issue for anyone.” “Trust is a funny word in Chinese. Trust based on Western culture or based on Eastern culture... I think in Eastern culture there is respect, which is almost the same thing as trust. One year is too short, they know you’re gonna leave. But they respect you… which is as close it gets to trust.” “Yes. It took a while probably to establish… by nature. This is what I heard from the Scots anyway. They take a lot of pride in being more cynical and… more skeptical in general. I think you have to earn the trust.” “I mean, yes, it takes time. I think one of the biggest areas of... aha, or light bulbs that went on in terms of learning over time, the first one is in the area of trust. Trust in general, and this is something that was mentioned in the cross-cultural training that I had when we went into [European country], but you don’t really..., until you experience it, you don’t really understand it. In America, most people will trust someone until they break your trust. Generally, in Europe, trust is given out

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in small doses. [...] You can meet a person, and I may trust you with a small piece of information, and I’ll observe what you do with it, ok. And then I will give you another piece of information, and soon the trust builds like a stair step. In the United States, you’re already at the top of the stair step, and when the trust is broken, it’s broken like a cliff. In China..., in Asia, my experience with the Chinese was, again, the trust is still kind of built up, but once it’s broken: never be trusted again. Much more black and white. If you break the trust, once I’ve trusted you, then... it’s like you almost don’t exist.”

Seven respondents said that trust had never been a problem, and the remaining four people stated that there had been some difficulties:
“I didn’t work for their company, and so there were people that were always a bit worried about sharing company strategy, company business information, which was to be expected.”45

Were the expatriates also accepted into the social group by the local staff? Half of the respondents (N=10) said they had socialized with the locals all the time and had made some good friends there:
“Yes, yes. - Did you meet them after work, on the weekends…? - All the time, yeah, yeah… and that was nice. That definitely made the adjustment a lot easier. Because some expatriates I talked to felt isolation and just kind of… you know, they went to the American Club… where all the other Americans were, and I never became a member of the American Club, kind of stayed with the locals, and I thought that was quite nice.” “So you had also some friendships with local people there? - Yes. Yeah, I developed many friendships. In both situations I integrated very easily into... common societies, common everyday life, and avoided places where expatriates would fraternize. So as a result, I can speak Chinese, and I learned, I studied Japanese. So for me it was easy.” “Oh, I’m one of the few that were invited into Chinese homes. That’s a very rare occasion. And I had several Chinese friends who would invite me to take trips to their family, go into their home and have dinner. And most of the expatriates were never invited into a Chinese person’s house.” “When I left there was... I cried and cried and cried, because of people that... I question whether I’ll ever see them again. You know, that kind of thing. They became a very big part of my life, so... So you made some good friends there? - Yeah, yeah. (sad voice) - Other Americans or also locals? - Locals. A lot that were connected with work, but not Americans. I mean I knew people from the American society, but they really were not the people I became really close to.”

The other half said they had socialized with locals only occasionally. The reasons for that were either language and cultural barriers, the expatriate’s spouse, or the wish to separate business from social:
“To the extent that I socialized, yes. I had plenty of opportunities to do that. Like I said, my wife is not a social person. So, since she didn’t have a social group, I couldn’t spend a lot of time doing other social things. - So, you didn’t often meet them outside work? - Well, occasionally, but not a lot.” “Well, yeah, to some extent. That’s kind of tough, because you’re also the boss, so… I tried… at some point to separate myself a little bit, because those people were reporting to me. So I did a lot of socializing with them, but only to an extent, you know, you still have to go in the next day and

45

The office where he worked was within another company.

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be the boss, so sometimes that’s difficult. Sometimes it’s a bit lonely. Because you don’t… have a group of friends outside of the company yet.” “Oh, to an extent, I mean, as much as you can be accepted. We had very different cultures and languages…” “Uhm… as much as I would let it. I could have certainly been more involved if I’d wanted to, but I generally tend to separate my business from social and cultural, whether it’s domestic or international, but it was certainly not…, there was a willingness… as much as I wanted to.”

Usually, there were also other expatriates around — if not in the company, then at least in the town. Fourteen respondents said there had been other expatriates around, eight of which considered it to be a real expatriate community, and they had been — more or less — part of it:
“There’s a very strong expat community, there’s... a women’s association that my wife went to, there’s an American Club... there’s lots of organizations like that which are well established in Hong Kong that make life a lot easier. You could seek out as much or as little contact as you like. It’s a built-in social network that has lots of support... Christmas parties... things like that... tours... they put together.”

In the remaining six cases, there were only very few expats or none at all. A bit more than half of the repatriates said they had been socializing with people from their home country on a regular basis (N=11):
“Yes. I think that was natural. We became kind of… you know, we were more… closer socially than we would have been here in the U.S.” “Yes. The longer I stayed, the longer I get to know, and things get easier as everybody starts finding each other.”

Others tried to stay more with the locals and did not socialize a lot with other expats:
“We lived in the city, we didn’t live in an American community. And there was no strong pull for us to do our socializing with Americans.” “There was the American chamber of commerce in Japan. I was a member of that. But I really wouldn’t go that often. It kind of put me off… it turned me off to a certain extent. So I’d go very infrequently. I had American friends, but I didn’t really go out to socialize with other Americans, and I didn’t, you know, go to these clubs and functions.” “Not on a regular basis. Partly because they all lived on one side of town, and I chose to live on the other side. So, that was one reason why it just wasn’t necessarily convenient. They were all there with their families, and I do not have a family, so… it’s just… and I probably wouldn’t associate with them here anyway, I mean, so it was like… they weren’t the same folks I would normally associate with and… It happened that my team was about my age, we had about the same interests, you know I traveled to some of the same places, so…” “Did you socialize with the other expats on a regular basis? - No, on an irregular basis. Sometimes spontaneous. A lot of times I declined some of those invitations… because during the week nights I was busy with school. And weekends were the time to… just go and do my thing. In China I was teaching on Sundays. Yeah, I was teaching elementary… children, the children of the factory workers. So that was really… I don’t need to go race go-carts, I preferred to teach English to these factory children. - Did you like that work? - Oh I loved it!”

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As was shown earlier (cf. Table 6 in section 4.2.4), people who tend to socialize more with locals are also more likely to feel comfortable in the host country and reach a high level of psychological adjustment.

4.5.4

Different Aspects of Satisfaction

The question whether the respondents were satisfied with the expatriate process and the way it had been handled by their companies was already discussed earlier (cf. section 4.3.1). There remain two other aspects to be covered though: satisfaction with the job and with personal aspects related to the host country, the local people, and so forth. Four fifths of the repatriates in this sample stated they had been very satisfied with their overseas work position (N=16).
“Yes. - What was especially satisfying about the job? - I think I liked it because I knew I was making a difference, based on achievements from the statement of work, knowing what I was going to do, and being able to check things off the list. Also seeing the changes I was making being accepted organizationally, even if it was only for a short term, like some people said that they would go back, at least seeing the changes being made. And then… just knowing that things were changing, that I was a change agent that was, you know, making things happen.”

Four people said there had been some problems, and they had not always been completely satisfied. One particular aspect appears to be very important here, and that is the ability to make a permanent impact, a difference. This shows again the importance of intrinsic motivation — the job itself has to be satisfying, it is not only the bonus and other monetary incentives that make a person feel happy with his or her job.
“I can’t say… not entirely, somewhat, in some areas. Some areas went well, and I was happy with them, I felt I could make a difference. In other areas I felt it was very frustrating not being able to make a difference. So… I would say so-so. Fifty-fifty.”

The reluctance of the host workforce to make changes was a problem for several expatriates:
“Satisfied with my performance, yes. Again, satisfied with the programs that we were working for, yes. A little less satisfied with… uhm… the overall corporate support. It kind of baffled me that they would put this type of investment, both monetarily and personally, into having expatriates come there, have the staff support the program, you know, working with you and support the programs, but struggle so much to want to implement certain things, because of either cultural difference, or that it might require a little bit more of an investment. If you’re gonna invest 70 million into some new program, I don’t see why not put in the extra 30. - For the implementation? - Yes, exactly.”

As to the personal aspect of the expatriate experience, everybody was quite or very satisfied:
“Oh yeah, yeah, it was… yeah, I ate it like a large Quiche. Big and delicious. I think some people would… even going on a holiday would be stressful. And actually living there and developing a routine… is another challenge. Yeah, I just loved it.” “Yes, very much. If there’d ever be, you know, a totally perfect experience, they could have managed the traffic and… managed the climate… (laughs). Those things are a challenge even to the people who live there.”

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Section 4.6 is going to cover the remaining questions that have not been treated so far.

4.6 Other Findings
4.6.1 Self-Assessment of the Expatriates’ Performance and Cross-Cultural Competencies How successful were the Pacific Northwest expatriates on their assignments, and what did they learn abroad? These questions will be answered solely from the expatriates’ own point of view, since none of their managers or superiors were interviewed in this study.

4.6.1.1

Performance

Just over half of the respondents believed their own assignment to be a complete success (N=12). This is how they described it in their own words:
“In both my cases the companies became profitable, highly successful, you know, IPO..., we overachieved every single one of the business objectives in both situations. So, great success from that aspect. It’s a complete success. In terms of the company perspective, again, we exceeded every single goal, every financial measure, all of them were exceeded.” “I think it was a complete success. It was probably the most successful project ever undertaken at [name of company].” “I feel I accomplished everything that I was sent over there to do and more.” “A complete success. Just because it... because we made so much progress in so many areas, like I was talking about being kind of fragment and very independent over there, not really part of the global company, we made a large stride in bringing that closer together and having it really linked and communicating with the parent company which we didn’t have before. We were breaking down lots and lots of barriers... communication barriers and things... and even cultural barriers, to bring people together more as a team, we did a lot of that. We did a pan-European computer installation and harmonized all of our processes and things... in a six months period of time. And I was the head of that project. And that was six months faster than anybody had ever done it before. That was a complete and total success. Actually the thought was it was impossible to do. But with the teamwork and all that stuff, we did it. So... lots of things like that that clearly were a success.”

The remaining eight interviewees said it had been at least a partial success, and usually the problems seem to have been outside the individual expatriates’ responsibility. It might be interesting, in a future study, to also talk to their superiors at the local branch and/or at headquarters and to compare the answers.
“I can answer that in two ways. I was there to assess, and plan, and help implement, and I accomplished those things. But... the things that we planned to implement were not implemented... a hundred percent by the host company... either due to budget, cultural difference, or... no staff. So, yes and no. I did what I was supposed to do, but... I don’t think the company that I was there to support is getting the full benefit, they’re not using it all. They don’t have the skill set, they don’t have the staff... the budget, they just do things differently.”

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“Depends on how you look at it. The objective of the work was to commercialize a product. And that objective wasn’t met. The project in the end was terminated... a year or so ago. On the other hand, the reasons for not being successful were less to do with what I was doing than what was necessary for the business aspect. So, what I did technically, it was successful, where the overall project in the end was a failure.”

There was basically only one person who talked about his own mistakes as possible reasons why the assignment was not a complete success:
“I don’t think you can go to either extreme. It certainly wasn’t a failure. A complete success... I can’t say that either. But certainly... almost a complete success, I would say. In hindsight, there’s definitely a few things that I would do differently and could have done better. - What did you accomplish? Or what didn’t you accomplish? - On the positive side, we did hire the nationals we were looking for, we opened an office in [name of country]. I think the headquarters is much more comfortable with the expats, the procedure, sending expats over there. I had the unique position of being managing... you know, managing the people and being an expat. And I think international HR gained a lot from that, and our business gained a lot. On the other side of the coin... I could have done... better... I probably over-managed, or tried to over-manage the expats. - In what way did you over-manage them? - Control them... or... I expected them to go through me for too many decisions. Toward the end of the assignment, we all figured that out. They were resisting me and fighting me, trying to go around me for a long time, and so it was a cat and mouse game. And at the end of the assignment I finally realized... you know, better to let the mice go. I didn’t need to watch them as much as I did. I was trying to do too much for them, stopped them in some ways... or tried to be the police, when I didn’t need to be the police.”

Does the so often cited “Failed Expatriate” really exist? At least in this sample there is not one person who was a clear failure, but certain people did talk about others who were having much more trouble or even had to be sent back home:
“I sent home a large majority of people right after..., you know, people would come and think they might stay for two or three years. As soon as we got the network built I sent them home, because... you know, they weren’t happy, they weren’t culturally sensitive, there was this ‘We’ll show them, we’ll do it our way, they’ll never learn...’. I mean, you had all these mindsets, and I just got these people home.” “The company had a bad experience with a person that was assigned to [name of country], and his family..., they had problems. Psychological problems. So there was actually, the company had a very bad experience from an expatriate assignment to [name of country], that was more related to the person. And that never worked out, it was a catastrophe. So of course, there were many eyes on me to see how this worked out. There was some hesitance... because of the bad experience.”

In Chapter 2, a failed expatriate assignment was defined as a premature return. For the sample of the present study, this definition might not be so accurate, since three respondents returned home earlier than planned, but according to their own statements, it was for reasons other than their personal failure:
“Because I had recruited... one of my assignments was to recruit a Chinese national to replace so we wouldn’t have to send another expat over. Once I had identified the person and recruited them, I couldn’t really ask them to stay... to wait around another year. So I came back early so that they could take over.” “It was probably a year and a half earlier, and... primarily because of the economic condition. For expense reasons. They were paying heavy expenses.”

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Another person had to come back earlier as a result of 9/11, since the industry he is working in was hit particularly hard after the terrorist attacks. A surprisingly large number of expatriates actually stayed longer than planned (N=10).
“I went over there with a... it was kind of an open-ended contract. Basically... I guess year by year we’d look at it again and say ‘You wanna stay?’, ‘Okay’... type of giving each other notice. It worked out, and then... Tom Miller’s46 predecessor, he was a little bit of a difficult person to work for. And I think that maybe if he had stayed longer, I might not have stayed longer in that role. But Tom came over, and he was like a breath of fresh air, he was a very good person to work for. So I enjoyed working with Tom. And then this other opportunity came up. And Tom encouraged me to do that. They wanted me to do that, he encouraged me to do it. So he gave me a lot of help and support. It was a risk. I mean, it was something that... I was comfortable in the job that I had, I enjoyed working for Tom, so it was a risk taking that opportunity. But I’m really glad I did, it was very good.” “I actually stayed one year longer than what was planned. - Was that your decision? - It was for my benefit, as it goes, there were company incentives to do it, but it was not part of the plan. And this was mostly to do with my family situation, as I got married, and my daughter was in school. So we changed the assignment, and I was working with our host company there. - Did they ask you to stay longer, or whose idea was that? - The idea I think was mine... initially. And how it happened was that... the company I was working for offered me work, they offered me a job to stay there. My company, when I came back and told them this... they came up with an assignment that made sense for both companies.” “I stayed about twice as long as I agreed. - Why did you stay longer? - Well, the assignment originally was envisioned for a year and a half. But as things developed with the business over there, the decision was made that it would be good for me to stay. - Who made that decision? You or the company? - The job was scheduled to end after a year and a half. And the decision was made to go forward keep someone doing that job, and I was asked to stay.”

If this is any indicator for the success of the individual expatriates, one can assume that they really were very successful, otherwise they probably would not have been asked to stay longer on their foreign postings.

4.6.1.2

Cross-Cultural Competencies

It was already mentioned earlier in section 4.2.1.3 that most of the expatriates in this sample were able to recognize complexities in other cultures and make more than merely superficial observations of cultural differences. The two most frequently mentioned answers to the question what soft skills they had acquired abroad were: cultural understanding (N=14), and listening or communication skills (N=12). Many became also more sensitive to the fact that the American way of doing things is not necessarily the only or the best way, as is illustrated by the following statement, for instance:
“You know, one of the things that Americans need to understand... you’re not always right. There’s a lot of ways to do things. And just because you’re from America doesn’t make you smarter than

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anyone else. And you see that attitude... And so... learning to get as many ideas as you possibly can, looking at things in a different way, and one of the neatest things that I learned was the Chinese culture.”

One person in particular thought that an expatriate assignment is especially valuable for Americans, as the next statement shows:
“[...] I think the experience is... especially for someone from the U.S... well worth it.... to see a different way of living. - Why do you say especially for someone from the U.S.? - Because the U.S. is so unfamiliar, really, with what the rest of the world is like. It’s a huge country, not so much population-wise, but as far as the land area. I mean, you can travel 3,000 miles and still be in the U.S. So if you do that, you don’t find a different language, you don’t find a different city, you don’t find things really all that different from West Coast to East Coast, some minor things, but unlike for example in your own country. You cross a valley, and on one side they speak Italian and on one side they speak French, and you can see where they speak German from there. From village to village, it might be a different dialect, and people live in a different way. So it is... the people from the U.S., even though they may be well traveling the country aren’t really familiar with... different ways of living, different ways of working. And so that’s why... what I mean about the U.S. And I suppose that’s more in contrast to Europeans than Asians.”

Others who had gained more knowledge about foreign cultures and a deeper understanding for them said:
“The other, I don’t know if it’s a skill, but the other thing that I came away with was the..., in Europe I guess understanding a lot where U.S. people come from... the... a lot of our traditions, a lot of our daily habits are based on things that are still alive and well in Europe. And you begin to understand how they changed over time to fit the U.S. mentality.” “And yes, it teaches you that the Western way is not the only way. And you can’t get that any other way than being immersed in a strong culture. I would call China a very strong culture. It’s huge, it’s ancient, it’s diverse..., you know, as opposed to many of the smaller countries. They got their own way to go about things.” “Do you feel you acquired some more tolerance for cultural differences? - Yeah, and I think so because there are certain things, especially like around the food, things that... in the States we would never eat. It’s a... you know, it’s a specialty there, and it’s a priviledge to eat things like snakes which was one of the big ones that... - Did you like it? - Yeah, it was ok. I was surprised by it, but it was one where they were like ‘Pete47, you have to do this’. And I said ok, so... Most people would be like ‘No, we’re not gonna do that’, so yeah... I learned a lot about that.” “I think... you do learn a lot about... people skills, dealing with people who have been raised in a totally different background, so they think differently than you do, because they’ve been taught differently than you. A lot of things that we take for granted... because everybody in the United States was brought up in a democratic society with a president and a senate and a congress and all that, Australia is a socialist country, uhm... with socialized medicine and very different way of looking at government and business. So I think you learn some real interpersonal skills about, you know, there’s this way and there’s that way, and neither of them are wrong, they’re just different. And being very respectful of each other’s beliefs, that’s really good. It’s really good.”

Since most of the expatriates in this sample were not able to speak the language of the host country, they had to learn a lot about communication, either in terms of understanding other people, or in terms of being understood by them:

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“What you learn in any international assignment, [...] is the ability to accept people and be aware of their differences, there are many subtle differences. Especially working in Eastern cultures, that’s why you have to be extremely, extremely sensitive to that. ‘Cause they never come up and tell you that something’s wrong ‘cause they’re very careful about not losing face. So you gauge by body language. The problem is what they don’t say. So you sort of have to learn to read between the lines.” “Yes, I think communication skills..., I learned to listen more patiently. Because you find out after a while that you think you understand things that people are telling you. But then, you know, two or three weeks later, maybe one week later you find out you had a totally wrong impression. And that happens pretty frequently, that happens very frequently. So you just have to be more patient, not assume that you understand their concept, their communication. And that’s probably generally useful, even in the same language.” “I learned, in another culture, you have to speak short and simple. So, communication-wise I understand the importance of being straightforward and clear, in the business aspect as well as personal aspects.” “You learn to listen to people... a lot more, a lot better, a lot more proactively. [...] Seek to understand before seeking to be understood. So that’s like listen to people first before... jumping with your ideas on how you think things should be. That’s very, very, very important to get. I may be saying the same thing, but you gotta make sure you understand before you sit there and make these presuppositions. That is just really, really important. And then to come back on the feedback and make sure they understand what you’re saying.”

What things were more difficult for the expatriates to learn or to understand? The issue of losing face appears to be one of the major problems in certain Asian countries:
“I mean, you know, from a cognitive point I can comprehend why they don’t do something. But from a cultural point of view it was a little bit more hard to... put your finger on it. I can give you a great example. People can say yes, but they actually mean no. They don’t say no because they don’t wanna lose face. And I could never tell them that they have because... this is very, very complicated. You have to be really, really careful how you address people.”

Sometimes it is just not possible to understand everything:
“There were a lot of things, but I just..., I don’t know, within a month or two, I just gave up on those things. Here I always try to find some explanation for everything, but there, after a while, it’s ‘Let it go, don’t worry about it. That’s the way it is. Don’t try to make sense out of it’. Can’t really think of an example, but it would happen frequently. I had that sensation frequently.”

The person who made the next statement lived in the host country for a very long time and socialized mainly with locals, but there are still a few things one does not understand about the foreign culture if one did not grow up there:
“I guess... there’s so many things that are difficult to understand as you get there. I mean, I’ve heard people say that Japan’s like an onion, they said if you peel... you think you know it, you look at Japan, and then you peel the skin off the onion, you look underneath, and it’s totally different. And it just keeps going on and on and on. So the longer you’re there, the more deeply involved you get, and there are a lot of differences and there are a lot of things that I still probably don’t understand completely because I’m not Japanese. It’s a very complex culture.”

Others commented on religious differences that were hard to understand:
“[...] when you go to a country that is Buddhist, and you have all of these differences in the religious aspect, that was much more of a set of challenges. Much more... something that you had to

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adjust to and adapt to. Like I said, simple things like burning money and giving things to their ancestors for their after-lives and all of these kinds of things..., it’s very interesting to understand. You know, just different. You have to invest time in understanding that, because it helps you understand how people approach their life and their decision-making.”

A lack of deeper knowledge about the host culture and its traditions might also be a reason for problems sometimes:
“Some of the traditions that... especially the Taiwanese were very... a lot of what they do is based on tradition.... and understanding the importance of tradition on what they do or don’t do... and not knowing the tradition and the story that goes with it... you just didn’t always know what was driving people sometimes.”

But even with this knowledge, it is still hard to really understand people’s feelings:
“Well I would say... it’s possible to understand... I mean... I can understand things in my head... but it’s impossible to understand the strength of people’s feelings. In other words, you can understand things intellectually, but I probably really can’t understand, in the case of the Czech Republic, the strong feelings towards the Russians, for instance, or the Germans. Well... the history. I can understand it on an intellectual basis, but... that’s different... to understand how people really feel.”

Again, timing issues and the pace of life appear to be major differences for Americans:
“Yeah, I can give you a specific example, but there are a lot of things that..., when you first arrive there, that they’re doing differently than here in the U.S. and understanding why they’re done that way always took a bit of patience and questions. And most of these things have to do with the speed in which we do things in the U.S. We hurry from place to place, we have meals in our cars and at our desks, I guess that’s the easy one. In Finland as well as in Central Europe, a meal-time is a meal-time, you sit down and you have a meal, and you take your time going through it. And when it’s finished you go back to work. Coffee breaks... you don’t go to the coffee machine, get a coffee and run back to your desk. You stop, and you take 15 minutes, and you talk to everybody else in the office. These are things designed to be social, not habits. And in the U.S. we run them as habits. So I think that... especially when I first got there, you know, why aren’t people working from seven in the morning until eight at night? Why do they stroll in at nine? Why do they take an hour and a half for lunch and go home at five or six, you know, depending on what they felt like? Those were questions that I really..., you know, how do you get anything done? Or the other approach: No wonder you never get anything done. That kind of thing you run into a lot.”

4.6.2

Factors that Influence the Expatriate Experience

At the end of Chapter 2, a conceptual framework was presented which showed, amongst others, the factors that have an influence on the expatriate experience. The factors that seem to be the most important ones according to this empirical study are the following: Employee-specific variables: If a person has an outgoing personality, is willing to adjust and integrate with the locals, able to make friends easily, and has a certain sensitivity to cultural issues, that will definitely help to make the experience a more positive one. The position in the company also has a certain influence in terms of insight and background knowledge about

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the company’s long-term strategy and the amount of support and training received by the company.48 Previous international experience seems to be very helpful, especially in the difficult period of adjustment, and it does not even have to be experience in the same country/region. The ability of the spouse and children to adjust and integrate with people in the host country does not directly influence the adjustment of the working expatriate, but surely has a certain influence on the experience as a whole. Firm-specific variables: The existence of conflicts within the company can be a big problem for expats who are caught in between the two fronts. Cultural sensitivity of top managers in the home company is frequently missing and would probably help making the expatriate assignments more successful, especially the repatriation. If the managers have never been abroad themselves they can hardly appreciate the true value of an overseas assignment. The amount of interest in the expatriate experiences shown by company officials seems to be another very important factor. Political situation: Surprisingly, no one really commented on the political situation in the host country, but obviously, the current political situation in the U.S. seems to have quite an impact on the expatriate experiences. For instance, several people mentioned that the U.S. had changed after September 11, the politics seem weird and strange, and they came back to a very different country. Some are actually ashamed of being American because of the current president and his politics. One person is even considering giving up his U.S. citizenship. This situation is rather unusual for Americans — a nation who usually is quite patriotic. And one person had to return early from the assignment due to the economic development in the particular industry after September 11. Socio-cultural dimension and cultural distance: It certainly influences the expatriate experience, but greater cultural distance of the host country does not necessarily mean that the assignment will be especially difficult. Culturally close countries can be just as difficult. Technological dimension: The internet makes it easier for expatriates to communicate and stay in touch with the parent company. Job-specific variables: A large degree of autonomy, decision-making authority, and responsibility is usually considered as something positive. What seems to be most important for the

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motivation is the ability to make a permanent impact in the host company, to contribute value. The expatriate needs to feel he or she is doing something important there. Perceived organizational support: That is extremely important for the motivation; especially the lack of support often has a negative influence. What have we learned from this study? Chapter 5 will discuss the conclusions and recommendations that can be developed based on the results presented here.

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5

Findings and Conclusions

The last chapter will start with a summary of the conclusions that can be drawn from the results of the empirical study that were presented in Chapter 4. The second part shows some limitations of this study, before recommendations for practitioners as well as suggestions for future research in this area will be discussed. The closing remarks are intended to show what benefits and additional insights were gained from the present study.

5.1 Summary of Main Conclusions
The research questions introduced in Chapter 3 can now be answered. 1. Do business expatriates from the Pacific Northwest in general have a positive or a negative attitude toward their international assignments? Generally, they have a very positive attitude toward their assignments. The positive aspects usually seem to outweigh the negative ones, and in fact, three quarters of the respondents in this sample would like to go abroad again some time. The most frequently mentioned reasons why these foreign postings are perceived as such a good experience are: the interesting nature of the work and the amount of responsibility and autonomy; the ability to travel and explore new countries; friends that are made in the host country; personal development; and the opportunity to get to know and learn about another culture. There are of course also some negative aspects to the experience. Although practically everybody in this sample said they had enjoyed living and working abroad, some also stated that they had missed their families or the conveniences that many Americans simply take for granted. Other negative points are related to the general support provided by the companies (see question 3) and the repatriation and career-related aspects (see question 4). 2. Do these expatriates convey the same adjustment experiences as the ones that can be found in the relevant literature? Can the U-Curve Theory of culture shock (UCT) be confirmed for this sample of expatriates? Overall, no one appears to have had serious problems adjusting — at least not the working expatriates. The adjustment really is multidimensional, and it is also true that different factors can influence different aspects of adjustment — i.e. work, interaction, coping with the nonwork environment, and the psychological mood states (as suggested by Mendenhall/Oddou 1985, and Black/Mendenhall/Oddou 1991). The often-stated relationship between cross-

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cultural training and adjustment cannot be confirmed by this sample though (see e.g. Yavas/Bodur 1999, 1999a, Selmer 2000, 2002c, Forster 2000). It may be that the expatriates did not realize how valuable the training really was, but none of them had the feeling that the training provided by the company facilitated any of the aspects of adjustment much. Another statement that is not supported is that the adjustment of the spouse has a direct effect on the general and interaction adjustment of the working expatriate(see e.g. Shaffer/Harrison/Gilley 1999, Black/Mendenhall/Oddou 1991). Previous international experience does seem to have a positive influence on various aspects of adjustment though, a theory that was suggested by several researchers (see e.g. Yavas/Bodur 1999, 1999a), but rejected by Jan Selmer (2002c). The UCT appears to hold true for those who did have culture shock, since several interviewees mentioned that there had been a period of time at first where everything was new and exciting, which would represent the initial honeymoon stage, and after a while culture shock had started to really set in. It is hard to judge from the answers given by the respondents in this sample if they all reached the mastery stage at the end, but all except one appear to have been able to get at least to the third phase, the adjustment stage. It can also be confirmed that there definitely are factors that have a large influence on the duration and shape of the UCT and its four stages. Those factors are: anticipatory adjustment (i.e. pre-departure knowledge about the country of assignment), individual differences (i.e. personal characteristics of the expatriates), and perceived organizational support. The last one of these factors is added to the two that were suggested by the relevant literature (see Black/Mendenhall/Oddou 1991). Those individuals who tended to socialize more with the locals were also more likely to feel comfortable and happy in the host country, i.e. very well psychologically adjusted. A possible explanation for this fact can be found in Social Learning Theory (SLT), which basically states that people cannot only learn based on the consequences of their own actions, but also based on the observation of other people’s behavior. It can be assumed that expatriates who spent a lot of their free time with locals and made many friends among the host nationals were also able to observe their behavior very often and learn from it. This could very well be the reason for them feeling more comfortable in the host country than other people who socialized less frequently with locals. Based on these findings, SLT appears to hold true for the expatriates in this sample. Another theory that comes to mind in this context is the contact hypothesis. According to previous research (see Caligiuri 2000), greater contact with host nationals only facilitates adjustment if the expatriate possesses the personality characteristic of openness. Those who chose to socialize with locals in their free time can be assumed to be more open to

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getting to know the host culture, as opposed to others who had contact with local co-workers in the office, but decided to spend their free time with other expatriates. 3. Are the experiences of these expatriates, as regards support during the international assignment, similar to the ones suggested in the literature? To what extent are the expatriates provided with company support? As regards company support, the findings of previous studies can largely be confirmed (see e.g. Harvey 1997, Riusala/Suutari 2000). Very often, the support that is offered by the companies is either not enough or the wrong kind — several expatriates declined what was offered to them, while others said they wished there would have been more support. Logistical support and help with practical aspects (such as shipping goods) is always very good, but in the areas of career-related support or help during the repatriation there seems to be room for major improvements still. In each case, there were always individuals within the company who were very supportive — that can be either the host country workforce, other expatriates from the home country, people from the HR department at headquarters, or the expatriate’s superior in the local facility who often was also an expatriate. What is frequently missing though is the feeling that the companies value the expatriates’ contributions and care about their well-being. The findings of the present study are not surprising at all, when compared to the relevant literature(see e.g. Vermond 2001). Quite a large group of respondents said they did not feel that people at headquarters truly appreciated what the expatriates were doing abroad, and they felt pretty much “out of sight, out of mind”. Several of them believed that their managers in the parent company did not even know what the expatriates were doing, let alone support them in what they were doing. It has to be said though that not everybody was unhappy with the company support, but a large enough number of respondents felt that their companies could have done better in this regard. 4. How do these expatriates experience their repatriation back to their parent companies? Do their experiences match the information found in the relevant literature? As was the case with the previous questions, the answers to question 4 support the findings of earlier studies in the same research area (see e.g. Baughn 1995, Riusala/Suutari 2000, Tung 1998, Vermond 2001). Coming back home is not always easy, and it is more difficult than what the expatriates might have expected. Changes to be dealt with are found both in the work setting and in the private life, and often it is difficult to talk to people back home about all the interesting experiences one had had abroad. Several interviewees appeared to be quite disap-

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pointed by the lack of interest shown by company officials — frequently there was no debriefing or not even a “thank you” for the work they had done overseas. The concept of the “internal” or “boundaryless career” that was introduced by Stahl/ Miller/Tung (2002) is very much supported by this sample of expatriates. Many of them think their assignment has helped them for their personal development and growth, but not necessarily for career advancement within their company. In almost all the cases there had been no long-term career planning before the assignment, and the foreign posting was hardly ever included in this planning or given enough consideration. Quite a large number of respondents felt left alone when they came back and had to find a new job within their company, and they thought the company had not done enough to help them finding a new and interesting position where they would be able to use their newly acquired skills and knowledge. The findings as regards the corporate repatriation policy also seem to be consistent with the results of earlier studies (see e.g. Peterson/Napier/Shul-Shim 2000, Riusala/Suutari 2000) — frequently there is no job guaranteed upon return, and the policy is unclear. This is not untypical for American companies in particular. A promotion upon repatriation is quite rare, and usually the repatriates felt their overseas job had been more interesting than their new work. Many of them also had the feeling that their superiors did not really value their international experience or that the company is not getting the full benefit of it. A very small minority of respondents were actually given a position relating to the country where he or she had served as an expatriate. As to the communication between headquarters and the expatriates, several respondents had the feeling of being “out of sight, out of mind”, and again, it is the perceived organizational support that appears to be important. Expatriates who feel that their company does not really care about them are often quite frustrated or disappointed. 5. How do these expatriates assess their own experience, especially their overseas performance and cross-cultural competencies? All of the respondents in this sample considered their assignment to be a partial or complete success, and none of them appeared to be a clear failure. Some respondents did mention other expatriates though who had to be sent home early or did not manage to adjust in the host country; but obviously none of these “failed expats” participated in this study. Half of the expatriates were actually asked to stay longer on the assignment, which might be an indicator of their success.

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A clear majority of expatriates were able to gain a deeper understanding of the culture of the host country or of cultural differences in general, and/or to improve their listening and communication skills. Some of them were aware of the fact that Americans frequently feel superior to other nationals and that they might be wrong in this assumption — other cultures may do things differently than Americans, but it does not necessarily mean that one or the other way is better. Some even felt embarrassed because of other expatriates there, the so-called “Ugly Americans”, who behaved as if they were much better and more intelligent than the locals and thought they could do everything the way it is done in the U.S. Although the majority still identified more with the American culture, very frequently they were able to see the positive aspects of both cultures and were willing to adjust to other approaches — both at work and in their personal lives. Almost everybody felt very committed to the company and the international assignment, although in certain cases this commitment grew weaker over time. The most desired form of loyalty though, i.e. high dual allegiance, is quite rare, as suggested by Black/Gregersen (1992). The expatriates usually got along very well with their host national co-workers, and about half of them also socialized with the locals on a regular basis and made good friends. 6. How do these expatriates view the IHRM practices of their companies, such as the selection procedure, cross-cultural training, and the companies’ performance appraisal procedures? What differences can be noted compared to the suggestions given by academic researchers? What matches the results of previous studies in the area of expatriate selection is the fact that technical expertise and work experience seem to be the most frequently used criteria for selecting a suitable expatriate (see e.g. Welch 1994, Mendenhall/Oddou 1985, Halcrow 1999, Tung 1981, Tung 1982, Peterson/Napier/Shul-Shim 2000). Many respondents said that soft skills and personal qualities had also been part of the selection, but hardly ever were these assessed through a formal psychological test. Usually they were simply judged by the candidate’s superiors — a finding that seems to be quite consistent with the literature (see Welch 1994). In this sample, only a very small minority said their spouses had been included in the selection though, which is less than what could have been expected from looking at existing research (see Tung 1982). The recommendations and suggestions from the literature appear to be widely disregarded — for instance, in very few cases there was a rigorous selection process with formal (both tech-

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nical and soft) selection criteria, and the researcher did not get the impression that these companies truly tried to identify global leadership candidates for the overseas postings. It is true that practically all the companies did offer some sort of cross-cultural or language training, but unfortunately many expatriates were not satisfied with the type of training or the timing — this is consistent with previous findings (see e.g. Harvey 1997, Tung 1998). What may be a bit more surprising is the total lack of a relationship between training and any aspect of adjustment. The reasons for the often-missing training are concurrent with the literature again: there is not enough time, it is not considered effective or not necessary, or the assignment is only of a short-term nature (see e.g. Osman-Gani 2000, Forster 2000). Again, it must be said that the recommendations given by academic researchers are usually ignored (see e.g. Tung 1981, 1982, Peterson/Napier/Shul-Shim 2000, O’Sullivan/Appelbaum/Abikhzer 2002): In no case could it be found that the training provided by the company was tailored to the needs of the individual candidate and the specific circumstances of the assignment, but there is simply a standard course offered to all the candidates. The researcher has no ground to believe that there has been any kind of needs assessment before the training. The third aspect to be examined is expatriate performance evaluation. Not surprisingly, the expats are frequently assessed with the same system as their domestic counterparts (see e.g. Gregersen/Black/Hite 1995). Quite a few respondents said they did not have the feeling their managers at home ever knew exactly what the expatriates had been doing abroad and what challenges they had had to face. Frequently they were evaluated by another expatriate in the host country though — i.e. a person who knows how it is like to work in that country and what additional difficulties the expatriates have to deal with. As to the recommendation to use multiple raters, usually there was only one person in charge of the evaluation, although quite often that person was using feedback from others as well. 7. Can one discern any common patterns in the experiences of the Pacific Northwest expatriates? The majority of expatriates in this sample can be described as “cosmopolitans” — they all appeared to be more or less able to socialize and interact with locals, to earn the trust from their host national co-workers, and to see the positive aspects of both their home country and the host culture. In general, the Pacific Northwest companies are not considered to be doing a bad job regarding the management of their expatriates; there are many programs in place to prepare and support the overseas employees. But it must also be said that there is still room

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for major improvements in various aspects (see also section 5.3 below). The expatriates in this sample generally enjoyed their overseas assignments, but this was mainly for personal reasons, not so much because it had helped them with their careers. They also perceived their overseas positions as more attractive and interesting than the jobs they presently have at the parent company. Often there appears to be only little strategic planning and preparation for such assignments, and the expatriate management is not really formal — i.e. informal selection procedures without any rigorous selection criteria are rather typical, helpful cross-cultural training is frequently lacking, and training is not tailored to the needs of the individuals. There is little communication between headquarters and the expatriates and therefore a lack of knowledge about the challenges the expatriates have to deal with. Performance evaluation systems are not really modified for assessing employees on foreign postings, often the appraisal is only informal, the expatriate performance is not always assessed against previously defined individual performance goals, and there is hardly any integration of expatriate assignments in the long-term career planning. Although the importance of spousal adjustment is widely recognized, the companies are still rather hesitant to include the expatriates’ families in the selection procedure. Surprisingly, hardly any of the respondents in this sample were able to tell how the success of their assignment is defined and evaluated by their superiors, or if there is any evaluation at all. Although the expatriates are usually sent overseas for important reasons, there seems to be no discussion at the end whether the strategic goals of the assignment had been met and whether the company considered a particular assignment to be a success or not.

5.2 Limitations
Of course, there are also a few limitations to this study: First, it was designed as a crosssectional, not a longitudinal study, i.e. the interviewees were questioned at one specific point of time. Probably the results would have been different if they had been interviewed a year or two earlier (e.g. all the comments about the current U.S. politics might have been different), or immediately after they had returned from their assignments — which would of course mean that it would have been impossible to conduct all those interviews within two months. Next, the sample is rather small, which is typical for qualitative studies. It might very well be that other people would have had different experiences. Third, practically everybody in this sample is a U.S.-citizen, and all the companies are U.S.-based. According to Peterson/Napier/Shul-Shim (2000: 164-165), there are alternative approaches to expatriate management. American and British MNCs apply similar practices, but German and Japanese

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companies for instance use quite different approaches. The results are therefore not generalizable to all other industrial nations’ expatriate management experiences, since expatriate policies and practices are in part culturally influenced. A fourth limitation is that perhaps there was some pre-selection as to the names of interview candidates given by the HR representatives. It might be that the companies did not want certain people to talk about their experiences, especially people who they knew would mention negative aspects.49 And also, if the employees really feel loyal to their company, it could be that they are not always completely objective in what they are saying, i.e. they avoid telling negative things about their companies. This might not hold true for everybody though, since several people in this sample were quite critical toward their companies. There is also a problem with memory — after a while, the former expatriates may remember only the good aspects of their experience, and they might have forgotten how hard it was initially to get used to the traffic, the weather, and so forth. It seems doubtful that there really was so little culture shock among the expatriates in this sample. It could very well be that if the interviews had been conducted at the actual time of the assignment, the respondents would remember more of the negative aspects. One last limitation is that people who screwed up probably do not want to talk about this, nobody likes to admit his or her own faults. They probably would not want to take part in a study like this, even if their companies asked them to participate. Several people mentioned others who — in their view— appeared to have had serious problems adjusting, but obviously none of these persons took part in this study.

5.3 Recommendations for Practitioners
The results of this study lead to a series of recommendations for practitioners, i.e. IHR managers. One of the biggest issues is clearly the repatriation aspect, which seems to be rather unsatisfying still. A lot can be done to make improvements in that regard. For one thing, the MNCs should definitely make better use of the talents and skills that were developed overseas. In order to achieve that, either managers or an HR representative at headquarters ought to be assigned to keep in touch with the expatriates as a kind of mentor, and ask them on a regular basis what they have learned and how they feel they could contribute most to the company success upon return. It is necessary for the company to try to plan ahead and find suitable positions for the repatriates where they can use the new skills and knowledge they

49

In all but two cases, the names of the interviewees were obtained through their companies.

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have acquired. This might be a lot of work, but it would probably be worth the effort. The repatriates would be more than willing to contribute more and to actually work in a setting where they can fully employ their international knowledge. They do want their companies to get the full benefit of the investment that was made in their overseas postings, and they would certainly be happy to show what they have learned — and they have learned a great deal. A second recommendation that is somewhat related to the first one is for management and HR representatives to show more interest in the expatriates when they return to headquarters. This does not cost a lot of money, nor a lot of time, but it would definitely be appreciated by the repatriates, and the lack of that interest was in fact frequently noted. It does not necessarily have to be a formal debriefing, but really, any sign of interest from company officials is appreciated and would make them feel better about what they have done abroad. They want to hear something like “Thank you for the job you did over there”. This recommendation should be particularly easy for the companies to implement, and they might be surprised what a difference it will make as regards the motivation and attitudes of their repatriates. There is a third recommendation related to repatriation. Reverse culture shock and the difficulties associated with settling back into the home company and/or country frequently come unexpected for the returning expatriates. This is clearly something the companies should prepare them for, or at least assist and support them through this difficult period of readjustment. This might not be so easy to accomplish, since even when there are repatriation programs in place, they are sometimes not considered very helpful by the expatriates. It might be worth investing some more in terms of finding out what kind of help the repatriates really need. Although most companies at least try to find out if their expatriate candidates are culturally sensitive or have certain soft skills required for an international assignment, all but one respondent said there had been no pre-screening whatsoever of their spouse and/or family. Some spouses had a really hard time in the host country, and their husbands might have been feeling bad about that. This could possibly be a problem for the motivation of the working expatriate, although not confirmed by this sample. Anyway, it might be worth doing some pre-screening of the accompanying family members in order to find out if they are really willing to spend a fairly long period of time in a foreign country and adjust culturally. A very big missing point is clearly the training and support, which should fit the needs of the individual expatriate. Not everybody likes the same type of language course and company involvement, some are more independent than others. It is absolutely important for the MNCs to find out what the expatriates really need — and what they don’t need. A lot of money

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seems to be wasted on expensive, but useless, language and cross-cultural training that does not fit the needs of the expatriates. The MNCs should clearly consider doing a proper needs assessment before spending money on standard training courses that might not be all that helpful. More long-term career planning can also be recommended to the MNCs. They need to try to integrate expatriate assignments with the employees’ overall careers. Therefore, career development activities should include the international assignments. The expatriates have to know (if possible before they even leave for the assignment) what the long-term career impacts of this will be for them. Obviously, this is something that is not done very frequently. Again, perceived organizational support appears to be extremely important, as several interviewees said they had felt their company did not really help them with career planning, and that this “would at least make me feel like they care”. So, even if these activities do not help the individual repatriates to find a suitable job upon repatriation, it would definitely make them feel better towards their company. Another suggestion that can be made is to improve intra-company communication. Many expatriates feel as if they are “out of sight, out of mind” while on the foreign posting, and they miss a lot of information about what is going on at headquarters in the meantime. This is often a problem when they come back home, because they do not know anymore who is doing what, how the new performance evaluation system works, what happened to the previous coworkers, and so forth. Better communication might also help the companies to gain a better picture of what their expatriates are actually doing while on assignment. Last, but not least, if the top managers of the MNCs had more international experience themselves, they would probably be better able to understand what it means to successfully complete a foreign assignment, and they could better appreciate the value of such an assignment. There are also a few recommendations for the expatriates themselves. The most important one would probably be for them to learn the local language. That would definitely be appreciated by the host nationals and also facilitate interaction. The second suggestion is to try to get involved with the host nationals, as opposed to socialize only with people from the American Club — it really appears to make certain aspects of the adjustment much easier. Finally, it can be said that it is a good idea to be open to new cultures and try to see the good things in each culture, both of the home country and the host country. Most expatriates in this sample took advantage of this opportunity to gain valuable knowledge about a foreign culture, and they all perceived this as something very positive.

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5.4 Future Research
It was already mentioned earlier that it would definitely be interesting to do a similar research in other countries, using the same basic interview guideline. Research questions could be for example: Do expatriates from European or Asian countries really learn the language of the host country much better than their American counterparts? Or do other expatriates who are sent to the U.S. make so many comments on the faster pace of life here compared to their home countries? There are many questions in this study that would be worth a comparison. Maybe there should be a bigger interviewer team with members from different countries as well. In this sample, there were no expatriates who had been to Latin America, the Middle East, or Africa. A future study could also try to find repatriates that had been assigned to those countries. Another addition to this study would be to conduct additional interviews with the HR representatives of these seven companies, and/or with the direct superiors of each individual interviewee and compare the company-perspective with the answers given by the expatriates in order to get a more accurate picture of the real situation. For a longer-term study, such as a doctoral thesis for example, it would make sense to interview each expatriate at different stages in the process, i.e. immediately before he or she leaves for the assignment, some time during the first couple of months in the host country, after one or two years there, shortly before the return back to the home country, and after the repatriation. That would of course also help to get a complete view of the experiences.

5.5 Closing Remarks
What are the benefits and additional insights gained by this type of qualitative study, as compared to previous research in this area? It was shown that letting the interviewees talk freely helps to obtain a complete picture of their actual experiences. Interviewing the expatriates, as opposed to company representatives, yields different results. While previous studies have shown, for instance, that more and more companies are offering cross-cultural training for their employees, by talking to the expatriates themselves it could be found that they do not perceive this training as very helpful and are often not happy with the timing or the mode of delivery. Another example would be the general company support and the various aspects of the expatriation process. It can be assumed that most companies support all their expatriates in more or less the same way — but how the employees perceive this support varies greatly from person to person. By talking to company officials one would hear only one side of the story,

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not how the expatriates felt about these programs. It was shown that this is something that is extremely subjective, and every person has a different view on how their company takes care of the expatriates. By letting the interviewees talk freely, they were given the chance to say exactly which aspects of the expatriation process and support they were less than satisfied with and give specific examples of how they feel their companies have failed or could have done better. Had they been given a set of options to choose from in the interview, it may well be that the answers would have been different because their specific experiences might not have been included in the set of predetermined answers. Thanks to their openness and willingness to talk about their experiences, the researcher was able to learn about their individual perceptions, views, and feelings. As to the questions concerning the U-curve, several respondents seemed to have experienced those four stages in the same order as they were introduced by the literature — first the honeymoon, then the culture shock, and after a period of adjustment, they reached the mastery stage — although these phases were in no way suggested by the interviewer. The insights gained from these questions would have been very difficult to obtain through a fully structured interview consisting of questions that can only be answered with yes and no. The possible problem of interviewees’ reluctance to assist the researcher that was expressed in section 3.1 did not materialize in this study, since all the respondents were more than willing to talk about their experiences. Nobody refused to answer any questions, and in fact, several of them mentioned after the interview that they had been glad to talk about all this. All of them had so much to tell, and often they did not have the chance to share their experiences with other people at their company. The original goal of this study — to get to know the expatriates’ own views and attitudes — has been reached, and it was definitely a very interesting and rewarding experience to talk to these repatriates and listen to their stories.

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Appendix
Appendix A: Interview Guideline

Interview Guideline: Expatriation Experiences

A. Description of the International Assignment

B. Adjustment C. Support during the Time of the International Assignment D. Repatriation, Future Career E. Self-Assessment of the Expatriate Performance F. Self-Assessment of the Expatriate’s Cross-Cultural Competencies G. Personal Opinion on the Expatriate Experience

H. Selection Procedure I. Cross-Cultural Training, Preparation for the Assignment J. The Company’s Performance Appraisal Procedure

K. Background Information

Questions in blocks B through G refer to the individual expatriate’s view on the experience of living and working in another country. Questions in blocks H through J refer to the HR management practices of the multinational companies, as they are perceived by the expatriates, as opposed to the formal corporate strategy the HR executive would present.

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Name: ....................................................................................................................................... Date: ......................................................................................................................................... Place: ........................................................................................................................................

A. Description of the international assignment
1. Have you had one or more international assignments? If more than one, how many? And where were the previous assignments? Description of the (last) international assignment, factual information Country of assignment? Duration of the assignment? When did you come back? Accompanied by spouse/children? Type of job (management, technical, professional, administrative…)? How much interaction with host country nationals did you have? More/less responsibilities compared with the previous job at home? Decision-making authority? Autonomy from headquarters? Task novelty (different from previous job)? Culture novelty (different from home country culture)? Organizational culture novelty (different from parent organization)? 3. What was the purpose of the expatriate assignment?

2.

B. Adjustment Process
4. Do you think it was easy for you to get adjusted to… … the new work environment? … interaction with host country nationals in the work setting? … the general non-work environment in the host country? 5. 6. Would you say you experienced culture shock? When was that? How long did it take? Was there any help/support by the company in the adjustment process? If so: From parent company and/or local subsidiary? In what form?

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7.

How would you describe your level of … not adjusted somewhat adjusted generally adjusted very well adjusted

psychological adjustment? ..................................................................................................................... adjustment to interacting with host nationals? ........................................................................................ work adjustment? ................................................................................................................................... general adjustment? ............................................................................................................................... (at the end of the assignment)

8.

If accompanied by wife/family: Was it easy for your wife to get adjusted to the new environment? Was it easy for your children to get adjusted to the new environment?

C. Support during the Time of the International Assignment
9. Who was the main source of support for you while you were abroad?

10. In which way were those people helping you? Can you elaborate?

D. Repatriation, Future Career
11. How did you feel when you came back home? Did you experience reverse culture shock? Were things still pretty much the same as before you left? (At work and/or at home) Did you feel welcomed back? (By people at your company, friends, etc.) Was it easy for you and your family to readapt to your previous lifestyle? 12. How does the expatriate assignment fit in with the overall career path? Do you think the expatriate assignment was good/bad for your career? Does your company help you with career planning/career management? Were you kept up to date on what was going on in the parent company while you were abroad? Does the company have a clear and credible repatriation policy? Career impacts were never really considered 13. Now compare to what happened when you came back home: Do you consider the job upon repatriation as a promotion? Are you able to use the skills you acquired abroad in your new job? Do you feel your expatriate experience is of any value to the company? Are any more international assignments planned for the future? - if so: Can you elaborate? - if not: Why not?

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E. Self-Assessment of the Expatriate Performance
14. Do you consider your international assignment a complete success, a partial success, or a failure? Why? 15. Did you stay the whole time as it was planned, or did you come back home earlier? If you left prematurely, why?

F. Self-Assessment of the Expatriate’s Cross-Cultural Competencies
16. What positive things did you learn while you were working abroad? I am less interested in the technical skills you acquired, but rather more interested in the personal qualities you developed. 17. What things were more difficult to learn about the foreign culture? 18. Were you able to speak the local language before you arrived? Can you speak it now?

G. Personal Opinion
19. What was your motivation to go abroad? 20. Looking back, do you have a positive or negative attitude toward your expatriate experience as a whole? Why? Can you elaborate? 21. How did you feel while you were working abroad? Which country/culture did you identify with? (home culture, host culture, or both) Did you feel more loyalty toward the parent company or toward the local branch? (in cases of conflict of interest, and also in general) How did those attitudes change over time? How would you describe your organizational commitment at that time? Your belief in your own mission? Your commitment to the international assignment? How did those attitudes change over time? (compare beginning vs. end of the international assignment) Did you feel that the contributions and inducements were well balanced? Or did you give more than you received, or vice versa? Would you describe the organizational culture as very supportive? (at home and/or abroad) How was your relationship with the local staff? - Did you feel welcome? - Did you feel they trusted you? - Did they accept you into their social group? Were there any other expatriates of your country in the community? If so: - Did you socialize with them on a regular basis? - Was there a real expatriate community?

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Different aspects of satisfaction: Were you satisfied with your job there? - Were you generally satisfied with the expatriation process and the way it was handled by the company? - Were you satisfied with the personal aspects of the whole expatriate experience (e.g. landscape, local food, weather, people, etc.)?
-

22. If you had the chance to go to the same place again, is there anything you would do differently than last time?

H. Selection Procedure
23. Do you know how you were selected for this particular expatriate assignment? Were any formal selection criteria used? If so: which? Interview with the expatriate candidate only/with candidate and spouse? How many interviewers were there? Were there any other candidates? Was the family situation given any consideration in the selection process? (children’s education, spouse’s job) Were you/your family willing to go abroad? Was that of any importance in the selection process? No idea?

I. Cross-Cultural Training, Preparation for the Assignment
24. Was any cross-cultural training provided by the company? If so: What type of training? - pre-departure or post-arrival training? - Was the spouse included or not?
-

-

If not: Do you know why not?

25. Do you think you were well prepared for whatever culture shock there might have been? Or did you feel you were left on your own to cope with living in the new culture? 26. Looking back, would you say that you were given a realistic job preview? 27. Was the local staff in any way prepared for your arrival? E.g. were they informed of any important cultural differences and the dominant cultural way of behaving you brought with you?

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J. The Company’s Performance Appraisal Procedure
28. Was the same performance appraisal procedure as used in the parent company used in evaluating your expatriate performance? Was the difficulty of working in a foreign culture given any consideration? 29. Were individual performance goals set regarding your international assignment (e.g. increase the number of customers by x %, increase market share by x %, …)? If so: Were the assignment goals clear to you, or were they ambiguous? 30. Evaluation Procedure: Who carried out the evaluation? (parent company and/or local branch) Who set the standards? (parent company and/or local branch) How many raters were there? 31. How is expatriate success evaluated by your superiors? Is there any evaluation you know of?

K. Background Information
32. The expatriate’s person Age category: 20 - 34 35 - 44 45 - 54 55+ Tenure with the company Number of expatriate assignment(s): 1 2 3 4 5 6 6+ Position in the company now (lower/middle/top management, professional, administrative) Nationality Marital status, children Male/female 33. The company (check out Website first!) Size (number of employees): 500-1’000 Stage in the internationalization process Industry Historical background 1’000-5’000 5’000-10’000 10’000+

Thank you very much for taking the time to talk to me!

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Appendix B: Letter Sent to HR Representatives50
Date Name and Address of Person

Dear Mr./Mrs. …

The intent of this letter is to gain your help in locating managers and/or employees who have recently (last two years) returned from an expatriate assignment with your company or have joined your firm after returning from a recent expatriate assignment with their former employer. I am mentoring a licentiate student, Annette Bossard, who is completing her degree at the University of Bern in Bern, Switzerland, but is doing her field work for her licentiate paper here in Seattle. Annette arrived in Seattle at the end of October, and will stay here in Seattle until the end of April 2003. During the past month, she has been doing a complete review of the research literature on the expatriate experience, as opposed to the managerial function of administering the expatriates by their employer and outside consulting firms. She is presently developing an interview guideline that she will be using in her interviews of former expatriates who are now working in the greater Seattle area. The interviews will probably require from one and one-half hours to two hours, and can be carried out during work time or outside of work hours. I thought it helpful to explain the licentiate degree as offered by universities in a number of Western European countries. The licentiate falls somewhere between an American master’s and Ph.D. degree, but incorporates elements of exposure from both American degree programs. Annette has an excellent command of both spoken and written English, so that the interviews should go quite smoothly. I have already seen some of her work, since she arrived here. I see no difficulty for her to explore the insights that former expatriates have regarding their foreign posting(s). A summary of her findings and conclusions will be sent to you, as well as each of the former expatriates who are willing to be interviewed by her upon completion of her paper. For your information, I have had a long-term interest in expatriate management, and worked with two colleagues in the past 11 years doing interviews with international HRM staff of 29 American, German, British, and Japanese multinationals in their corporate headquarters, as well as 56 of their foreign

50

This letter text was printed on the official letter paper of the University of Washington.

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subsidiaries and joint ventures outside the home country. More recently, I interviewed managing directors and other directors of multinational operations in the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. An article will be published by the Journal of World Business in May 2003. Previous articles have appeared in Management International Review, The International Executive and The Thunderbird International Business Review. I want to insure you that all interviews will be voluntary on the part of the former expatriate. Furthermore, we assure both the firm and the interviewee confidentiality and anonymity in the way she reports her results. If you have any questions, please feel free to call me at (206) 523-5340 where I have voice mail. Annette plans to contact you the week of January 15-19, 2003, when she returns from a vacation here in the United States, regarding what help you feel free to provide. We trust that you will feel free to support her project by providing the name, address, and phone number of possible interviewees. She will do interviews in late January, February, and early March.

Sincerely,

Sincerely,

Richard B. Peterson Professor of Management and Organization

Annette Bossard Licentiate Student

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References
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Independence
“I thereby declare that I have written this paper independently and have used no aids other than the ones indicated. All the parts that were taken from other sources, literally or in a general sense, are identifiable as such. I am aware of the fact that otherwise the senate would have the authority to withdraw the title bestowed on me on the basis of this paper.”

Seattle, April 27, 2003

Annette Bossard