Intercultural Management

Expatriation is quite common in multi-national corporations. Multi-national corporations

need to identify the causes of failure in order to find a solution for them. (Lee & Wen, 2007).

High rate of expatriate failure is experienced by the corporations. This is vital to a

corporations when an employee is not able to adapt to the culture of the country. These kinds of

situations faced by expatriate’s impact their performance in the workplace.

Some major causes are improper candidate selection, inability to adapt, problems with

family, lack of preparation and training, and insufficient compensation.

Selection of the candidate for an assignment is one of the most important decisions a

multi-corporation can make. Corporations need to look carefully at the assignment at hand in the

country and select the best candidate that fits the assignment and hand the pressure and

challenges of a new job and different location.

While working in different cultures, managers can find it difficult to adjust to the local

customs and traditions along with communicating with the locals which can then cause difficulties

in the workplace, moral, and personal problems at home. Multi-national corporations should have

established support programs in place for expatriates to contact the home corporation along with some

sort of career guidance in the overseas location.

Difficulties can happen in the workplace when personal issues are happening at home.

Families and spouses can make a managers work more difficult when they do not adjust or didn't

want to relocate in the first place.

As mentioned by Deresky (2008), high rate of expatriate failures is related to poor

preparation and planning for entry and reentry for the international manager and for the family. (p. 248)

Expatriates and their families experience some sort of culture shock resulting from the move from anxiety and or

expectations....