TOPIC: Success of IHRM in training and development; of expatriates
As you read the article you choose for this assignment, consider the following questions: How could the topic of this article apply to your personal or professional life? How could it apply to an organization you have observed?
The article you choose must meet the following requirements:
be peer reviewed, relate to the concepts within this course, and be at least 10 pages in length.
The writing you submit must meet the following requirements:
be at least3 pages in length, identify the main topic/question,
2002 Employee Development and Expatriate Assignments 1 EMPLOYEE DEVELOPMENT AND EXPATRIATE ASSIGNMENTS Citation: Mendenhall, M. E., Kuhlmann, T. M., Stahl, G. K., & Osland, J. S. (2002). Employee development and expatriate assignments. In M.J. Gannon & K. Newman (eds.) The Blackwell handbook of cross-cultural management (pp. 155-183). Oxford, UK & Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell. 2 EMPLOYEE DEVELOPMENT AND EXPATRIATE ASSIGNMENTS The expatriate adjustment research literature has grown enormously in the past two decades, and the trend seems to be continuing unabated as the field moves into the new millennium. Thus, it seems both timely and prudent to pause and take stock of the nature of this growth, and the implications that it holds for future research and practice in the field. Those scholars who began conducting research on expatriate adjustment in the late 1970s and early 1980s (especially those in the field of human resource management and organizational behavior), find themselves, ironically, in a new, vastly different professional culture. They are no longer pioneers, but part of a world-wide cadre of scholars who are actively engaged in conducting research in the area of expatriate adjustment and international human resource management. However, despite this progress, challenges remain in the field. It is an unfortunate fact that it is not uncommon for scholars who study expatriation from a human resource management perspective to be unaware of expatriate research that is being done by someone in another discipline, and vice versa. Scholars who research expatriate issues from the disciplines of anthropology, communication, human resource management, psychology, and sociology have few common journals in which to publish their findings and models; thus, scholars find homes for their research papers in the journals that reside in their major fields. This contributes to an unfortunate condition of the “right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing,” since it is rare for scholars to seek out and read journals that are outside of their fields. The field may technically be multi-disciplinary in nature, but it is not yet truly inter-disciplinary; the research findings that reside in separate disciplines remain, for the most part, in publication “silos” that do not lend themselves to integration between disciplines. Some scholars have informally discussed the necessity of a comprehensive review of the expatriate adjustment literature so that a collective sense regarding “what we know and what we don’t know” about the phenomenon of expatriation can be developed. There seems to be a need for the important findings, theories, and patterns of 3 knowledge about expatriation and repatriation to be warehoused in one place, so that scholars from a variety of disciplines can access the totality of information that is extant. The purpose of this paper is to take a first step in beginning to bridge this “awareness gap” in the field. We will attempt to broadly summarize the theoretical literature of expatriate adjustment, and will then broadly summarize the general empirical findings in relationship to the field’s theories. Additionally, this paper will attempt to link the literature review to issues of application and practice, a dimension that has been lacking in previous review efforts. TOWARDS A TYPOLOGY OF EXPATRIATE ADJUSTMENT MODELS The initial context for theory-building efforts in the field, and the main motivation behind early theory-building efforts generally centered on the need to organize independent variables that atheoretical, empirical studies found were linked to various measures of expatriate adjustment. Using this approach as a foundation, over time theorists began to develop more conceptually and logically elaborate models based on theoretical assumptions. In order to compare and contrast the various theories/models, a rough typology of models was developed, based upon the classification typologies of Kühlmann (1995a) and Stahl (1998); in this paper we classify the theoretical models in the field in the broad categories of: 1) Learning models; 2) Stress-Coping Models; 3) Developmental models; and 4) Personality-based models. Some models in the field are “theoretical hybrids” that draw from multiple theoretical perspectives; these will be discussed within the categories to which we believe each one conceptually best fits. Also, in this paper, the literature of cross-cultural communication theory will not be reviewed; though much of this literature arguably deals with some aspects of expatriate adjustment, it does not do so from the specific perspective of the expatriate, and often does not relate its constructs and findings to broader issues of adjustment. For an introduction to this literature, please see Samovar & Porter (1991). Learning Models Some scholars who worked in the theory-development domain in the area of expatriate adjustment in the 1970s and early 1980s relied heavily upon extant psychological learning theories as foundations for their own model development efforts 4 (David, 1971, 1972; 1976; Dinges, 1983; Guthrie, 1975; 1981). They made the assumption that since expatriate adjustment had to do with learning new skills and techniques of adaptation, it was logical to use constructs from learning theories in the field of psychology as foundational constructs for their own models. Guthrie (1975) summarized these views when he stated that there were parallels between expatriates living overseas and extinction-produced aggression, changes in reinforcers, changes in secondary reinforcers, accidental reinforcement, and the reinforcement of novel behavior, and held that “it may be fruitful to look upon a second culture as a massive change in reinforcement contingencies (1975: 112).” The work of these scholars did not produce full-blown theories per se, but their research was grounded in the traditional propositions of behaviorism, albeit applied to the realm of expatriate adjustment. Their research approach laid the groundwork for later scholars’ more comprehensive theory building efforts. As the influence of Skinnerian behaviorism waned in psychological circles, neo- behaviorist theories, such as social learning theory (Bandura, 1977) emerged and the ideas inherent in these new models were applied by some scholars in the area to the problem of expatriate adjustment. Bochner (1981) argued that “the major task facing a sojourner is not to adjust to a new culture, but to learn its salient characteristics” (Furnham & Bochner, 1982: 164). He focused on attempting to understand the processes of social skill acquisition within a new culture. He believed that focusing on adjustment issues tended to bias the researcher to view expatriate adjustment as something that existed within the personality of the expatriate; that is, if the expatriate experienced failures overseas, such scholars deduced that the failure was likely due to some underlying pathology (Furnham & Bochner, 1982). Bochner (1981) extended the social skills model of Argyle and Kendon (1967) to the study of expatriate adjustment. This model makes the assumption that socially unskilled people have simply not learned, for a variety of reasons, the social interaction norms of their home culture. The model, originally developed to explain socially unskilled behavior within a single culture envisions social interaction as a performance, and that difficulties arise when the actors cannot maintain a successful performance. 5 Socially unskilled people manifest poor performance in being able to express their attitudes and emotions, exhibit proper body language, understand gazing patterns, carry out ritualized interpersonal routines (such as greeting others), and properly display assertion in social settings (Furnham & Bochner, 1982). Furnham & Bochner (1982) argued that the above problems mirror those of expatriates, and thus asserted that the social skills model was a useful one for the study of expatriation. They also argued that the model has the benefit of not being tied to “hypothetical intrapsychic events . . . which are used as explanatory principles (Bochner, Lin, and McLeod, 1980)… [rather] its conclusions rest on information about how particular groups experience specific situations in particular host societies” (Furnham & Bochner, 1982: 167). Testable hypotheses can be derived from the model’s primary proposition, namely, that the lack of requisite social skills determines the degree of culture shock experienced by an expatriate (Furnahm & Bochner, 1982). Black and Mendenhall (1990), and in another article with Gary Oddou (Black, Mendenhall, & Oddou, 1991), applied social learning theory (Bandura, 1977) to the study of expatriate adjustment. Like Bochner and Furnham, they argued that adjustment required that expatriates learn new roles, rules, and norms of social interaction. Extending Bandura’s ideas of social learning theory, they held that most new behaviors during an international assignment are acquired through observational-imitative learning. Major adjustment problems occur “because there is a high ratio of feedback to the individuals that they are exhibiting inappropriate behaviors relative to the new and appropriate behaviors they have learned, coupled with a low utilization of modeled and observed behaviors which are appropriate in the new culture” (Black & Mendenhall, 1991: 237). Using principles inherent in social learning theory (attention, retention, reproduction, incentives, and expectancies), they argued that learning novel cross-cultural skills required certain levels of rigor in training content, symbolic and participative modeling processes, and training methods linked to these variables, and developed a theory-based, contingency framework for conceptualizing and designing cross-cultural training programs based on these ideas. In 1991, with Gary Oddou, they developed a more comprehensive framework of cross-cultural adjustment. In the development of this 6 model, they reviewed the U.S. domestic relocation literature and derived a domestic model from it; next, they reviewed the cross-cultural adjustment literature and developed a model from it. They combined these models into an integrative, comprehensive model of “international adjustment” and derived 19 propositions from this model, which in turn could each generate multiple research hypotheses. This model is a hybrid model, in that it includes dimensions that come from the personality/trait literature, relocation/transition literature, and sensemaking literature to name a few