Blackwell Reference Online

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An expatriate assignment is a job transfer that takes the employee to a workplace that is outside the country in which he or she is a citizen. There are differences between an expatriate assignment and other job assignments of an international nature. Expatriate assignments are longer in duration than other types of international assignments (e.g., business trips), and require the employee to move his or her entire household to the foreign location. Thus, in an expatriate assignment, the employee's home base of business operations is in the foreign country. Expatriate assignments offer unique challenges to expatriate employees. Virtually all expatriates run into situations where the home office wants them to do one thing, while local situations dictate that another thing should be done instead. For example, in Japan, local conditions dictate that market‐share growth should be the main criterion of a subsidiary's performance, while the home office may force the subsidiary managers into focusing on quarterly profits as the main criterion of organizational performance. The expatriate assignment requires expatriate managers to face a number of complex issues that their domestic counterparts either do not face, or face with less intensity. Examples of such issues are the integration of large international acquisitions, understanding the meaning of performance and accountability in a ... log in or subscribe to read full text