Challenges and Complexities Faced by the Expatriate Manager When Managing Across Cultures
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Challenges and complexities faced by the expatriate manager when managing across cultures
Introduction
In today’s age of global organizations, characterized by the globalization, most companies tend to enter global markets in order to expand their businesses for new opportunities. There have been many investments, mergers and acquisitions. This phenomenon makes most multinational companies to manage their operations. Thus, expatriation becomes an important part of international management and firms’ success. This paper will illustrate how expatriate managers face challenges and complexities in terms of cultural differences and examine the movie “outsourced” as an example when an expatriate from the US is sent to India and faces people from different cultural background.
Challenges and Complexities
Sending expatriates to foreign tasks is not always successful. The failure of global managers to adjust to new surroundings is a serious problem because they have to encounter new and complex cultures and work practices (Oberg, 1960). Expatriate failure is the incapacity to adapt to living in a foreign culture, low performance and accomplishment in the host country and coming back to home country before completing the assignment. The rate of global manager’s failure in a foreign culture is continuously increasing and most expatriates fail depending on the host country. When they fail, there is a high possibility that expatriates will resign (Sims and Schraeder (2004). The success or failure of international operations depends on the performance of expatriates who have to deal with culture shock, expectations and differences in language when they live and work in another country.
The first challenge is that managers in the home country have to select the right expatriate for the international operation. According to Dohery, Dickmann and Mills (2011), managers seem to ignore and do not consider this problem when selecting the expatriates. Another challenge is that...
Introduction
In today’s age of global organizations, characterized by the globalization, most companies tend to enter global markets in order to expand their businesses for new opportunities. There have been many investments, mergers and acquisitions. This phenomenon makes most multinational companies to manage their operations. Thus, expatriation becomes an important part of international management and firms’ success. This paper will illustrate how expatriate managers face challenges and complexities in terms of cultural differences and examine the movie “outsourced” as an example when an expatriate from the US is sent to India and faces people from different cultural background.
Challenges and Complexities
Sending expatriates to foreign tasks is not always successful. The failure of global managers to adjust to new surroundings is a serious problem because they have to encounter new and complex cultures and work practices (Oberg, 1960). Expatriate failure is the incapacity to adapt to living in a foreign culture, low performance and accomplishment in the host country and coming back to home country before completing the assignment. The rate of global manager’s failure in a foreign culture is continuously increasing and most expatriates fail depending on the host country. When they fail, there is a high possibility that expatriates will resign (Sims and Schraeder (2004). The success or failure of international operations depends on the performance of expatriates who have to deal with culture shock, expectations and differences in language when they live and work in another country.
The first challenge is that managers in the home country have to select the right expatriate for the international operation. According to Dohery, Dickmann and Mills (2011), managers seem to ignore and do not consider this problem when selecting the expatriates. Another challenge is that...