International Job Assignments
Multinational Screening, Selection Criteria and Adjustment Tools
While expatriates can reap significant benefits and additional compensation from international job assignments, many return to their home countries unhappy.
Many international job assignments end even before an expatriate’s formal agreed-upon duty is over.
This happens despite human resource testing and interviewing procedures for both managerial and technical candidates.
Adaptability Challenges
Typically, reasons for returning to one’s home country go beyond failing to do a good job. Adapting to the host country’s culture usually forms the steepest barrier.
Specific issues include:
- Expatriates want their children educated in a home-country school
- Expatriates are not happy with the overseas assignment
- Family members do not want to stay overseas.
Selection Criteria
Because of these adaptation challenges, multinational organizations now impose rigorous selection criteria to select managers or officers for overseas assignments. General criteria include the individual’s adaptability, motivation, experience, education, age, leadership skills as well as physical and emotional health. Also, a successful international assignment depends heavily on the support of the spouse and children.
Today, organizations also examine a number of characteristics to gauge whether an individual is fit for an international job assignment. These include the individual’s:
- Work experience with cultures other than one’s own
- Previous overseas travel
- Foreign language abilities
- Recent immigration background or heritage
- Ability to integrate with different people, cultures and types of business organizations.
Adaptability Skills
Multinationals also test an individual’s adaptability for the following skills.
- Ability to solve problems within different frameworks and perspectives
- Ability to sense and accurately evaluate developments in the host country
- Sensitivity to differences of culture, ethics, politics and religion
- Flexibility to make decisions while coping with a lack of help and gaps in information.
Adaptability Screening Guidelines
Who makes the best candidates for an overseas assignment? In their textbook International Management, Culture, Strategy and Behavior, Hodgetts and Luthans formulate the following list of principles.
- Individuals most committed to their professional careers tend to sign up for overseas work.
- Unmarried employees are more willing to accept foreign assignments than any other group.
- Of married couples, those without children or with non-teenage children prefer to move.
- Because of the extra compensation and benefit paid, prior international experience will motivate people to take another foreign assignment.
Cultural Adjustment Tools
Before leaving for an international job assignment, many organizations provide anticipatory adjustment tools through pre-departure cultural seminars and workshop training.
Once the individual arrives in the overseas assignment, multinationals usually contribute in-country adjustment support mechanisms. These enable the expatriate to:
- Maintain a positive outlook in a high pressure situation
- Meet the challenges and decision-making stresses of the new job
- Adjust to the host-country’s organizational culture
- Deal with non-work matters like family adjustment
- Develop effective socialization tactics in the new cultural environment.
References
This article presents independent insights based on research from International Management, Culture, Strategy and Behavior (6th edition, Hodgetts-Luthans-DOH).
