Developing the local competence of expatriate managers for emerging markets: A knowledge-based approach

This paper proposes a theoretical framework for developing expatriate managers’ local competence in emerging markets from a knowledge-based perspective. We argue that local knowledge in emerging markets differs significantly from corporate knowledge transferred to those markets, and that its very nature determines its critical importance to expatriate managers’ business performance. We explore the processes and mechanisms through which local knowledge can be acquired and integrated into expatriate managers’ knowledge base supporting local talent development and their effective strategic decision-making. We suggest that conventional local competence development strategies may not be effective methods for developing global managers for emerging markets.     

A Taxonomy of Potential Contributions of the Host Country National Local Liaison Role in Global Knowledge Management

This article builds on the existing conceptualization of multinational corporation (MNC) knowledge management by exploring the critical liaison role played by host country nationals (HCNs), especially those working directly with expatriate managers. We first discuss this proposed HCN local liaison role between expatriate and local employees within theoretical constructs of network theory and absorptive capacity. Then we present a model of five possible important HCNL role componentsÑincluding cultural interpreter, communication manager, information resource broker, talent manager, and internal change agentÑand related specific behavioral functions for each component. We also consider benefits and limitations of this HCN local liaison role, as well as areas for future research to help elucidate and validate this present model of the HCN local liaison role. This model also provides some practical guidance to assist multinational organizations in taking advantage of this potentially valuable liaison role for enhancing performance in host‐country operations. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

The ‘disguised’ foreign investor: Brands,trademarks and the British expatriate entrepreneur in Brazil

Abstract

This article examines the impact of the British expatriate entrepreneur, and his processes of knowledge transfer, on the industrialization and economic development of Brazil between 1875 and 1914. It focuses on the textiles industry, and combines original trademark data with conventional trade and investment statistics, and also case study analysis about firms and their entrepreneurs. It argues that British investment in Brazil was higher and had a deeper impact on economic development than considered by existing research, as expatriate entrepreneurs ‘disguised’ a substantial amount of foreign investments by acting as shareholders and top managers of newly established local businesses.     

Mapping the Relationship Among Political Ideology,CSR Mindset,and CSR Strategy: A Contingency Perspective Applied to Chinese Managers

The literature on antecedents of corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategies of firms has been predominately content driven. Informed by the managerial sense-making process perspective, we develop a contingency theoretical framework explaining how political ideology of managers affects the choice of CSR strategy for their firms through their CSR mindset. We also explain to what extent the outcome of this process is shaped by the firm’s internal institutional arrangements and external factors impacting on the firm. We develop and test several hypotheses using data collected from 129 Chinese managers. The results show that managers with a stronger socialist ideology are likely to develop a mindset favouring CSR, which induces the adoption of a proactive CSR strategy. The CSR mindset mediates the link between socialist ideology and CSR strategy. The strength of the relationship between the CSR mindset and the choice of CSR strategy is moderated by customer response to CSR, industry competition, the role of government, and CSR-related managerial incentives.     

The hypercompetitive global marketplace: the importance of intuition and creativity in expatriate managers

The value of expatriate managers has always been predicated to a degree on the nature of complexity of the overseas assignment and the external environment. There are two emerging and interrelated processes of environmental change occurring that could have a direct impact on the selection of expatriate managers, those being, the globalization of businesses and the resulting hypercompetitive nature of global markets. Due to the rapid rate of globalization, organizations have recognized that the global managers need different skills than their predecessors who manned multinational corporations. In addition, the hypercompetitiveness of the marketplace has placed managers under a new time perspective that tends to overshadow other managerial constraints. Therefore, two additional dimensions (i.e., intuition and creativity) are examined as being useful in the selection of expatriate managers in global organizations. This paper assesses the value of examining potential expatriate candidates on the creative and intuitional intelligences, in that it is anticipated that these two abilities will become of inordinate importance in the global hypercompetitive marketplace.     

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder

This study investigates the internal ideational foundation underlying the host country public relations of multinational corporations by explicating the thinking of various public relations actors about what counts as good public relations work. It uses an abductive approach that combines theoretical deduction and qualitative induction. Data were collected through ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the subsidiary of an American multinational in China. Interpretation of the data reveals a global localism-informed orientation reflected in the views of expatriate managers, and a local pragmatism-rooted orientation in the perceptions of other public relations actors hired from the host country.     

Book Reviews

While globalization has led to a well-documented increase in expatriation among managers and corporate executives, increased internationalization and expatriation have not been confined to business organizations alone. Educational institutions are becoming increasingly international with academics also experiencing growing levels of expatriation. However, despite their increasing international mobility, expatriate academics remain a group about which very little is known. Drawing on exploratory research carried out in Singapore and New Zealand, this essay presents several propositions about the experiences of expatriate academics as a hitherto under-researched group. In addition the essay moves towards adding another dimension to the existing expatriate management literature by considering the extent to which it can be used as a framework for understanding expatriate academics. In doing so the essay proposes some of the differences between expatriate academics and expatriate managers. The areas of focus are cross-culture training, expatriate adjustment and the expatriate family.     

Subsidiary knowledge flow strategies and purpose of expatriate assignments

Although a general association between the role of international assignees and knowledge transfer has been noted in the international human resource literature, very little is known on how subsidiary knowledge flow strategies influence the purpose of expatriate assignments. Building specifically on Gupta and Govindarajan’s typology of subsidiary knowledge flow strategies and Hocking’s expatriate assignment purpose, we examine the link between subsidiary knowledge flow and the purpose of expatriate assignments using a mixed method approach. Combining survey data and qualitative interviews from 156 subsidiaries in the service and manufacturing sector in Malaysia and Singapore, we find that subsidiaries with divergent strategic roles have different knowledge flow strategies, thus leading to different purposes of expatriate assignments.     

How host organizations prepare for and learn from expatriate assignments

This article reveals what goes on inside host organizations prior to and during expatriate assignments. On the basis of analyzing organizational documents and conducting 43 interviews with host country nationals (HCNs) and expatriates in 30 Vietnamese organizations that host external foreign assignments, we provide a detailed account of HCNs' experiences and unearth sophisticated preparation and management activities designed to maximize these organizations' learning. We depict what we call “a host organization lifecycle” and extract five lessons: (a) host organizations prepare carefully in advance to learn as much as possible from expatriates; (b) HCNs experience quite dramatic adjustments and burdens during expatriates' placements; (c) mutual trust between expatriates and HCNs is a prerequisite for HCNs' learning; (d) most of HCNs' learning occurs informally via interactions with expatriates or observing how they work; (e) host organization managers actively manage HCN–expatriate relationships. Our findings outline a “wish list” of practices that expatriate‐using organizations could consider deploying for expatriate assignments that focus on the benefit of the host organization' development.     

Unpacking the “skill – cross-cultural competence” mechanisms: Empirical evidence from Chinese expatriate managers

International management (IM) literature identifies several important skill sets (namely, self-maintenance, perceptual, interpersonal, language and communication skills) that are important for expatriates’ cross-cultural management. However, how skills influence each other and work synergistically towards expatriate competence has not been well examined. Based on the theoretical perspectives of learning, social dynamics and the IM stream, we develop an integrative model to investigate the joint effects of skills on cross-cultural competence (CCC), by surveying and interviewing Chinese expatriate managers. We find that self-maintenance skills, interpersonal skills, and language skills do not relate to CCC directly, while perceptual skills contribute to CCC mainly through communication skills. Our study demonstrates that competence goes beyond understanding local culture and lies in the ability to effectively interact and communicate within the host context. This study contributes to expatriate literature not only by revealing the skill – CCC mechanisms, but also by extending knowledge into an emerging market context which provides theoretical and practical guidance for competence-building of expatriates from China.     

Making bottom-up and top-down processes meet in public innovation

Innovations in an organisation derive from multiple sources. In the public sector, users and the policy sphere provide important but often unconnected impulses for innovation. These impulses are transmitted to the organisation by grassroots employees who interact with users and managers who implement policy requirements. The paper examines the actors and activities that coordinate bottom-up and top-down initiatives and promote their development into innovations. It creates a theoretical framework that combines the views of employee-driven innovation and strategic reflexivity and supplements them with an analysis of coordination in innovation processes. The functioning of this framework is illustrated in the context of children's day care services. The results highlight the central role of middle managers and provide new knowledge regarding their ‘bridging’ activities in innovation. The adjustment of bottom-up and top-down processes requires the personal involvement of managers, and the creation of communication arenas, networks and mediating tools.     

Enhancing knowledge sharing from self-initiated expatriates in Vietnam: the role of internal marketing and work-role adjustment in an emerging economy

This study is an empirical exploration of whether internal marketing activities can positively influence self-initiated expatriate’s (SIE’s) work-role adjustment and knowledge sharing. Leader–member exchange is considered in developing a moderated-mediation model. Using data collected from 140 SIEs in Vietnam, the findings support the mediation model and specifically indicate that internal marketing activities can increase the degree of work-role adjustment which, in turn, influences SIEs’ knowledge-sharing. However, moderated-mediation analyses fail to support the role played by leaders in the implication of internal marketing activities. This model is intended to present an agenda for future research. Some theoretical and practical implications are also discussed.     

Staffing architecture for expatriate assignments to support subsidiary cooperation

The purpose of this article is to develop a theory‐based explanation of expatriate staffing system (architecture) supporting subsidiary cooperation in multinational organizations. First, an overview of the factors driving the need for this system to provide a rationale for the use of role theory in the development of four specific expatriate role categories in different assignments is presented. Second, we examine how the associated issues of expatriate dependability and competence are related to this categorization. Third, we outline how the design of appropriate expatriate staffing architecture can help resolve specific conflicting issues in subsidiary cooperation. In conclusion, we discuss specific implications of the proposed framework. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Career management of business expatriates from China

Chinese mainland business managers assigned to Hong Kong responded to a mail survey exploring issues on career management. The group of mainland managers was compared with a sample of Western expatriates, mostly from the US, France, and Britain. It was found that the Chinese expatriates had a significantly lower score than their Western counterparts on all the studied individual level career management variables: expatriate career preferences, meeting career goals within the corporation, career development fit, and right career move. Of the corporate level policy variables, corporate expatriate pool and separate expatriate careers also had lower scores for the Chinese than the Western managers. These findings support the behavioral process model of internationalization claiming that internationalization is a matter of learning. Implications of these results for internationalizing Chinese corporations are discussed.     

An external perspective on CSR: What matters and what does not?

The paper aims at investigating external factors influencing organizational corporate social responsibility (CSR)-related decision making. Two theoretical perspectives—stakeholder theory and institutional theory—have been applied to compile a list of external factors that might affect a company's CSR choices. As a result, a framework built on the government-related, society-related, and business-related groups of external factors is being suggested. This framework is used in the paper to answer (a) to what extent do different external factors influence CSR-related decisions in large Danish companies and (b) how has that influence changed over the years. The research takes a qualitative approach and is designed as a multiple-case study. Empirically, the paper relies on data collected from semi-structured interviews with CSR specialists and managers and presents a dynamic perspective on the pressure exercised by the external factors on CSR decisions and choices.     

Factors in the effective transfer of knowledge from multinational enterprises to their foreign subsidiaries: a Mozambican case study

The purpose of this article is to better understand the role of internal stakeholders in subsidiaries of multinational companies (MNCs) in order to offer potential insights into the cross‐border transfer of knowledge from those companies’ headquarters to their subsidiaries. The focus is upon subsidiaries in developing countries, here Mozambique. More specifically, the article is concerned with identifying factors that influence the learning of internal stakeholders and noting practices which seem associated with a high level of absorptive capacity and performance of subsidiaries. The starting point is evidence of ineffective transfer of knowledge by MNCs to their subsidiaries in developing countries, with consequent sub‐standard performance. The research reported involves four case studies of Portuguese companies operating in Mozambique and draws on data from interviews with senior and middle managers in the firms’ Mozambican subsidiaries. The results obtained suggest that successful knowledge transfer to overseas subsidiaries is found under the following conditions. First, the parent company knows the local context and provides a flow of relevant information. Second, application of knowledge locally is done flexibly to suit local circumstances. Next, a participatory approach is used so that local staff can see why the knowledge conveyed is necessary. Fourth, explanation and demonstration are key techniques, with major roles for on‐the‐job training, continuous improvement and training at headquarters. Finally, issues arising from local culture may need to be addressed.     

Modification of Transferred Training Programmes for Multinational Chain Hotels in Korea

Transfer of training programmes between countries has created a circumstance that enhances the knowledge and skills of human resources in developing or underdeveloped countries along with the influence of globalisation in recent decades. The purpose of the study was to explore the hotels in Korea. The study was based on both qualitative and quantitative methods. A questionnaire was sent to training managers of all the multinational chain hotels in Korea. In addition, telephone interviews were conducted with the training managers of these hotels. The cross-case analysis revealed that the transfer of training programmes had certain patterns of modification shaped by the interacting factors in a three-level hierarchy: cultural and technical, organisational, and modifiers’ personal level. Each level also was found to have a subset of factors influencing the modification patterns. Future research is recommended to investigate the framework of the study in other countries and industries.     

The Impact of Communication on Conflict between Expatriate and Local Managers Working in NPD Projects of MNC Subsidiaries: A Local Perspective

This study investigates the impact of communication between expatriate and local managers on two types of conflict in subsidiaries of multinational companies (MNCs) engaged in new product development (NPD). The data was collected from 438 local NPD managers who regularly collaborate and communicate with expatriate managers. The findings suggest that the quality and bidirectionality of cross-cultural communication reduce relationship conflict but increase task-related conflict. In addition, a more formalized communication style increases both relationship conflict and task conflict. The findings hold implications for MNCs in that improvements to different communication dimensions are suggested.     

The Impact of Distance (External) and Organizational Factors (Internal) on the Knowledge Chain of Multinational Corporations: South Africa as a Host Country

The geographic dispersion of multinational corporations (MNCs) implies that while it gives them access to new and different knowledge from diverse localities, it also adds to the costs and complexities of managing that knowledge and its effective dispersal across geographies. The purpose of this article is to examine how knowledge is transferred within MNCs and provide a framework for this process, particularly focusing on the role that distance (external) and organizational (internal) factors plays therein. A qualitative study is utilized, focusing on two technology companies from different cultural home countries and the technology transfer process with their South African subsidiaries. We find that the standardization of knowledge impacts the creation and diffusion of knowledge; expatriates impact on the creation, diffusion, and adoption; and, finally, relevance and localization impact on the adoption and utilization of knowledge. We present a conceptual framework around trust and rationalization as regards transferring knowledge within MNCs and find some evidence of the impact of distance, particularly cultural, on the methods employed in this transfer. The article illustrates the practical ways in which MNCs organize their internal resources and overcome various dimensions of distance in ensuring knowledge transfers. By choosing companies from such divergent home countries (one industrialized and one newly industrialized, with very different cultural settings) and examining their knowledge transfers with their South African subsidiaries, we are able to unpack various dimensions of distance and how organizational mechanisms affect this process. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

The effect of ethnic diversity on expatriate managers in their host country

Expatriate managers often encounter considerable obstacles in their overseas workplaces. While there is significant research on expatriate management and adjustment, relying on social identity and acculturation theories, little research addresses the expatriate experience of ethnic diversity in the host country. To address this gap, the aim of this study is to explore how Australian expatriate managers interpret their experience of working in a new and ethnically diverse workplace in Malaysia. The qualitative analysis suggests that the key to performing in such a context lies in the individual's ability to change and adapt beyond culture and language skills. The key managerial implication is that cross-cultural training can assist with the development of personal attributes by expatriate managers involved in ethnically diverse workplaces. Implications for future research are provided.