International Work Assignments

Paper Summary:

With the continued movement towards globalization, many American managers will have the opportunity to work internationally. Many of them will be transferred to another country, expatriated, and repatriated when they are transferred home. The paper shows that the process of expatriation and repatriation are much more involved for a company than executives originally anticipate. With this international trend, there becomes a stronger need to properly select and then prepare Americans for the foreign journey ahead of them. The paper explains that this training begins with cross-cultural training in general, focused on cultural dimensions, to very specific preparation for a certain foreign county, to family preparation for school and the roles females play in that society, for differences in management styles that are practiced, for the employee to American re-entry, and the issues that accompany that. The paper argues that, if American companies take the time to prepare the employee and family prior to the assignment, a much higher success rate is likely to be achieved. The paper takes an in-depth look at the cultural factors that might affect the success of these types of assignments.

From the Paper:

"The cultural dimensions that most experts would agree affect cross-cultural businesses include: societal culture versus organizational culture, high-context versus low-context cultures, monochronic versus polychronic cultures, the silent language, Hofstede's five cultural dimensions and Maryama's epistemological types. First, when examining societal culture versus organizational culture, one is looking at norms, behaviors and assumptions about how they are to act in a certain setting. In the organizational culture, this is usually derived from the values and behaviors of the top leaders and evolves into something all employees understand, even if it is unspoken. The same concepts apply to societal culture only they are socially derived."

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