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Unit 5: Recruitment and Selection for International Assignments

2. Career Problems: A foreign posting creates, for the expatriate, a number of career Notes
threats, being “out-of-sight, out-of-mind” and being passed over for promotion, the
danger of coming home a ‘stranger’ with few familiar faces among the greeters, the
possibility of being seduced by a foreign lifestyle and losing the desire to return.
3. Income Gaps: Income gaps can occur when compensation does not match the position
or the high cost of living overseas.
4. Lifestyle Adjustments: Expatriates and their families experience major adjustment
problems such as personal discomfort and uncomfortable living conditions, inability
to purchase housing, being far from home, concern for children’s education, health,
and general activities, spouses that cannot work, go to school, etc. Medical
limitations, concern for safety; and cultural/social problems.
5. Short-term Perspectives: Other expatriate problems are experienced because the
foreign posting is too-often perceived as a short-term obligation.
6. Inappropriate Leadership: Short-term expatriate assignments result in a lack of
continuity, what seems to be a constant change in policies and procedures, and
inappropriate leadership.
7. Performance Appraisal: There is confusing, conflicting, and short-term criteria used
in expatriate performance appraisal.
8. Business Environmental Issues: Expatriates must experience a number of problems
in the business environment, including diverse business customs and practices,
unfavourable, unfamiliar and unpredictable political climate, unfamiliar legal system
and contractual practices, complex trade barriers and governmental interferences,
unfamiliar and inhibiting labour relations problems, rigid status differences in
levels of employees, exacerbated by varying and inadequate education and skills,
control dilemmas, especially in centralised organisations, problems with the
measurement of the contributions of the foreign subsidiary; inadequate and
unpredictable transportation and communication systems, lack of facilities, scarcity
of raw materials and component parts, inadequate technology; inadequate data and
market research, advertising inadequacies, fluctuations in the local economy;
underdeveloped financial markets, money exchange and money management
difficulties, language barriers, conflict of cultural attitudes, values, and beliefs and
terrorism.

5.4.3 Success in International Assignment

The key variables that influence the outcome of a successful expatriate assignment from the
initial personal inputs of a particular desire for an international career along with capabilities
which may influence eventual personal success and the corporate inputs of the strategies of
internationalisation and international operations. Those personal propensities and abilities
will act on a person’s willingness as well as his own perceived suitability, to submit to a
selection process of a particular nature. This might be to a longer-term commitment to an
international ‘pool’ of high-flyers, or simply a one-off job.
On the company’s part, the nature of selection will be dependent on the international strategy.
This is closely bound up with the level of integration of expatriation in the organisation’s
operating strategy, as reflected in the nature of expatriation as a one-off assignment, part of a
management development process that may partly be ad hoc, but where an overseas assignment
is seen as part of developing general management capabilities, or an integral part of building a
pool of high-flyers who can undertake assignments anywhere in the world.

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