Building Intercultural Benevolence: Cultural Strategies and Their Receptivity

Abstract

In the context of Japanese parent country national (PCN) expatriation in the USA, I study the strategies which have been identified in the literature as building intercultural relationships. I posit and find support for a positive association between PCN expatriate cultural adaptation and local assessments of PCN expatriate benevolence. Diverging from past work, I posit and find support for a negative relationship between cultural coaching and local assessments of PCN expatriate benevolence. Under the title of receptivity, I further explore how certain individual attributes lead local colleagues to be more or less receptive to these strategies. In line with my hypothesizes, I find that a local’s prior visit to Japan strengthens the positive effect of PCN expatriate cultural adaptation while a local’s endorsement of an essentialist theory of race weakens the negative effect of PCN expatriate cultural coaching. I test my hypothesises with random coefficient modeling using data collected from 53 Japanese PCN...