International Success: Selecting, Developing, and Supporting Expatriate Managers

Citation

Stahl, G.K. (2001), "International Success: Selecting, Developing, and Supporting Expatriate Managers", International Journal of Manpower, Vol. 22 No. 1/2, pp. 173-182. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijm.2001.22.1_2.173.3

Expatriate assignments play an increasingly critical role in the execution of international business strategies and the development of global managers. International Success: Selecting, Developing, and Supporting Expatriate Managers, a small booklet authored by Wilson and Dalton of the Center for Creative Leadership, is designed to help practitioners understand and deal with issues related to the management of expatriates. The report targets human resources executives, line managers responsible for international staffing decisions, and individuals who are offered an expatriate assignment, rather than academics who seek to understand the complexity of the expatriate role and the various antecedents of expatriate success. This is important to note because those who will expect a thorough review of the expatriate adjustment and effectiveness literature will probably be disappointed when reading this book.

The report has been organized into four chapters and two appendices containing the description of a series of studies conducted by the authors and the interview protocols. The first two chapters provide a brief introduction to expatriate management, the main chapter deals with the selection, development, and support of expatriates and offers recommendations for developing a talent pool of expatriate managers, and the concluding chapter focuses on the question of whether global perspectives can be learned.

The first chapter, entitled “The costs of failure”, starts out with a brief discussion of what expatriates contribute to the organization and why it is so serious when their job performance is sub‐optimal. The authors report expatriate failure rates as high as an average of 45 percent to demonstrate that international human resources management policies and practices particularly in US companies are not grounded in best practice, thus compounding the enormous costs associated with expatriate assignments. Although the dramatically high failure rates reported by Wilson and Dalton have recently been questioned (Harzing, 1995), the chapter’s basic premises are beyond dispute: expatriate management systems are often inadequate, and improving international selection and development processes is of critical importance to the success of multinational corporations.

The next chapter, entitled “What does expatriate effectiveness mean?”, deals with the various criteria of expatriate adjustment and productivity that have been discussed in the literature. Contending that any definition of expatriate success will depend on the expectations of the particular stakeholder (in the home or host country, internal or external to the organization, and at different levels of the organization), the authors advocate a multi‐dimensional conceptualization of expatriate effectiveness. According to Wilson and Dalton, a multi‐faceted approach to the definition and measurement of expatriate success has to include aspects of work performance as well as variables such as personal satisfaction with the job assignment, adjustment of the family, and utilization of acquired skills on return. This is an important, albeit not novel, insight; the need to conceive of expatriate effectiveness in other than unidimensional terms has been acknowledged by scholars and practitioners in the field for a long time (e.g. Benson, 1978; Kealey, 1996).

The main chapter, entitled “How to create and maintain a talent pool of effective expatriates”, presents the Selection‐Development‐Support (SDS) framework designed by the authors, including the short‐term factors (those that can be addressed within months or weeks of the start of an expatriate assignment) and long‐term factors (those that need thorough planning and implementation over time) that must be considered for properly managing an expatriation‐repatriation‐system. Wilson and Dalton derived this framework from interviews with expatriates and repatriates, from an analysis of standardized tests and surveys they completed, and from the academic and practical literature on expatriate effectiveness. They explain each of the elements of the framework, along with quotes by the research participants, and derive recommendations for developing a talent pool of expatriate managers. The advice that they offer includes the following approaches and practices: considering candidates’ personality, early‐life experiences, and family readiness in making international selection decisions; providing language training, cultural training, and on‐the‐job assignments as a means of preparing employees for an expatriate assignment; facilitating outbound transition and family adjustment during the assignment; and addressing compensation and repatriation issues. For quick reference, the major recommendations are condensed in a two‐page table at the end of the chapter.

The final chapter, entitled “Can global perspectives be learned?”, deals with the human resource development aspect of expatriate assignments. Based on interview findings that suggest that expatriate assignments are a profound learning experience, the authors contend that international transfers are one of the most powerful strategies for developing global leaders. Consequently, they view the careful selection and training of expatriates not only as a prerequisite for successfully accomplishing the task goals of an international assignment but also as a means for developing the human resources that are necessary for meeting the challenges of a global business world.

While most of the recommendations offered in this report converge with advice given in current handbooks on expatriate management and international human resource management (e.g. Black et al., 1999; Dowling et al., 1999; Landis and Bhagat, 1996), the critical role that personality traits and early‐life experiences play in the expatriation process has not been documented extensively by the research literature. Given that most of the evidence regarding the importance of personality traits and early‐life experiences comes from a study of expatriates from the Middle East, I am reluctant to endorse all of the authors’ recommendations regarding the proper selection of expatriates. The validity of these recommendations rests on the highly problematic assumption that those personality traits and early‐life experiences that have been found to be important in a sample of expatriates from the Middle East are also critical to the effectiveness of expatriates from/in other regions of the world. Theoretical and empirical evidence clearly indicates that the antecedents and processes of expatriate adjustment and the recommendations derived from such findings are not easily generalizable across expatriates of different countries of origin or in different countries of assignment (e.g. Dowling et al., 1999; Ward, 1996).

Wilson and Dalton, at the outset of their report, state that their aim is to offer guidance to HR executives and others responsible for expatriate assignments. Given that objective, I was surprised that the authors did not examine more comprehensively existing innovative approaches to the management of expatriates. Great strides have been made over the past decades in the design of instruments to assist HR professionals in the proper selection, training, in‐country support, and reintegration of expatriates (see Black et al., 1999; Dowling et al., 1999; Landis and Bhagat, 1996). The progress that has been made in the acquisition of knowledge and the design of techniques necessary to improve the management of expatriates has not been fully acknowledged by this book. For example, the authors are largely silent on the issue of how to better select expatriates for international assignments with the exception of personality scales, they ignore most of the methods that have been designed to improve international selection decisions (e.g. structured interviews, biographical data questionnaires, behavioral assessment techniques, etc.). This is despite evidence to suggest that personality tests are of limited use in evaluating the capacities required for effective performance overseas (e.g. Deller, 1997; Kealey, 1996).

Overall, is this a text that should be on the desk of those seeking to understand and deal with issues related to the management of expatriates? For academics who are working in the field, the book contains few novel insights; for them, the description of the empirical studies and the interview protocols provided in the appendices will probably be the most interesting source of information. For those seeking an introduction to the field, the review of the extant research and available instruments in the field of expatriate management will probably be too selective. Despite these limitations, I do recommend the book to practitioners as a useful source of information, yet one that has to be read with caution. While most recommendations have significant potential value to HR executives, line managers, and employees embarking on an international assignment, others are merely speculative (e.g. those regarding the contribution of early‐life experiences to expatriate effectiveness). As such, perhaps this book should be seen as a source of information that will assist practitioners in their attempts to understand the many issues involved in successfully managing expatriate assignments, even though it does not fully reflect the overall development of the field.