Expatriate Selection: Insuring Success and Avoiding Failure
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The experience of expatriate selection and assignment has been a mixed success for multinationalfirms. Several selection strategies have been used, but failure situations in individual assignment cases are known to be in nearly every multinational firm. New research has indicated that the problem of insuring success for an expatriate is quite different from the problem of avoiding failure. A different set of factors is critical to each of these two problems. When this distinction is made, the variables related to the expatriate selection and assignment problem are considerably more ordered and operable. The number of individuals working for a business concern outside their native country has increased sharply in the last 20 years. Currently, U.S. citizens who work abroad for business firms number approximately 200,000;' expatriate executives of other nationalities add thousands to this figure. Each of these individuals was selected by some process to become an international business expatriate. This paper deals with the special problems of personnel selection and development facing the multinational firm. The methods currently used to select and assign expatriate executives are reviewed to incorporate the knowledge and lessons of the present, but the emphasis here is on a new dimension of the problem. An investigation of the selection techniques of the past two decades yields a mixed success story. Many individuals worked out well in their assignments overseas, but "it has been estimated that about 30 per cent of the people sent overseas by American companies are mistakes."2 The a priori differences between the successes and failure have not become apparent. In fact, the more many firms deal with expatriate selection, the more unsure they become as to how they can be successful in this process. Some firms have resorted to a "self-selection" process, in which the people who go abroad are simply the people with the proper technical qualifications who indicate a desire to go abroad. But failure is no stranger to this process, either. In-depth interviews with expatriate executives and the chief personnel officers of several large multinational firms have revealed a pattern *Dr. Hays is Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Business Administration, Tulane University, New Orleans. His publications include several articles relating to behavioral problems faced by the multinational firm and co-authorship of international Business. An Introduction to the World of the Multinational Firm, Prentice-Hall, 1972.
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of repeated frustration with the problems of expatriate selection and assignment. This is due to several seemingly unexplained "failures" of individuals in foreign assignments. There is a natural reluctance on the part of any firm to discuss these failures directly, but they seem to have occurred often among individuals who had good "track records" pr
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