Key Criteria of Expatriate Selection Influencing Expatriation Effectiveness

Table of Contents

1        Introduction        

2        Expatriate Selection as a key predictor to expatriate assignment’s effectiveness        

2.1        Definition of expatriate and expatriate effectiveness        

2.2        Expatriates selection’s impact on expatriates’ effectiveness        

3        Key selection criteria impacting expatriate assignment’s effectiveness        

3.1        Family situation        

3.2        Expatriate Adjustment        

3.2.1. Streams of variables of expatriate adjustment        

3.2.2        Work adjustment        

3.2.3        General adjustment and interaction adjustment        

4        Conclusion        

Bibliography        

1. Introduction

United East India Company set the history of the first comerical organization having expatriates who were assigned by its Dutch mother company in in the early 17th century. This expatriate assignment involved almost 1 million employees mostly from the Netherlands and Germany, and the destinations of their expatriate assignments were in Asia (Van Gelder 1997 in Mol et al 2005).

According to the research conducted by Black and Gregersen (1999), cited in Chew et al. 2002, nearly 80% of middle and large size companies are using expatriates and almost half of them have the plan to enlarge the amount of employees to send overseas. Global relocation is regarded as a competitive strategy wih considerable benefits resulting in large companies’ investments. There are many purposes or goals that the expatriate assignments are expected to achieve, such as: Obtaining global view, controlling overseas subsidiaries, transferring knowledge, developing potential managers and so on (Chew et al. 2002). As a result, corporations acquire a competitive advantege from the expatriates’ expeiricence. At the same time, corporations use the expatriate assignment as utilized opportuniti for their employees. (Harrison and Shaffer 2005)