Expatriates’ Success
Multinational corporations, wanting consistency in culture across their subsidiaries, might try to export the parent company’s culture by staffing expatriates in key positions of its foreign subsidiaries. MNCs using this tactic believe that expatriates can significantly impact the subsidiaries’ cultures (Kobrin, 1988). Selecting expatriates for foreign assignments would be quite simple for MNCs if success in domestic assignments were predictive of success in foreign assignments.
Unfortunately, the failure rate of expatriates is extraordinarily high despite the fact that it is generally the more successful domestic employees who are sent abroad (Tung, 1981). The high failure rate is understandable since many MNCs use the same employee selection procedures to select both expatriates and domestic employees with the same job title. But the performance requirements for domestic and expatriate jobs are likely to differ.
The expatriates in a given subsidiary, however, are generally working in environments comprised of many more host nationals than compatriot expatriates. This results in an organizational culture more similar to the host country than that of the more familiar parent country (Louis, 1980). Expatriates will adapt their behaviors, norms, and values to fit in and ultimately succeed in the cross-cultural environment.
MNCs can maximize the likelihood of expatriate’s success through appropriate selection programs. Since the dimensions comprising the performance construct for expatriate positions differ from performance in domestic positions, expatriate employees in a foreign environment need a somewhat different set of skills and abilities to accomplish the same job they performed successfully in a domestic environment (Tung, 1981).