Preventing Expatriate Failure

- A Research on the Expatriate Selection and Training -

Summary

Many companies face a high failure rate of expatriates. They return earlier or have a poor job performance. With the economic globalisation, most Multinational Companies (MNCs) need expatriates to manage the subsidiaries, as expatriates are more familiar with management techniques and methods used in the MNCs than locals. Expatriate failure represents a fault both in the selection process and the pre-departure training. Therefore, we intended to investigate to what extent the MNCs were using the selection and training methods and how the expatriates evaluated these methods.

While reviewing the literature, we focused on the culture shock theory, the models of the expatriate selection and training process. Ronen’s Model for the expatriate selection, Black and Mendenhall’s Model for the expatriate training became the strong theoretical basis for our further research. Then two main hypotheses were proposed to analyse the primary data from the questionnaires.

We found that there was a gap between the theory and the reality. Most MNCs were not using the selection and training for expatriates recommended by the researchers. Admittedly, a few companies did quite well when it came to the selection and training of their expatriates. The majority of expatriates had different opinions about the selection and the training process. Most selection criteria were not conceived as useful as the theories suggested, but a great part of the training methods were recognised as important by the expatriates.