Abstract
Expatriate management has evolved through the practices of developed economy multinational enterprises (DMNEs), with the aim of improving expatriate adaptability, cross-cultural adjustment, and performance. However, most of these studies focus on expatriates from developed countries and try to help DMNEs instead of emerging market MNEs (EMNEs). In a turbulent global economy, how EMNEs manage their expatriates when conducting business through their outward foreign direct investment (FDI) is understudied. This empirical study aims to address this research gap by utilising a qualitative approach and a multiple case study. It has conducted semi-structured interviews with expatriates, executives, and middle managers of Chinese MNEs in 2014. It contributes as one of the few to systematically examine expatriate related issues in the context of EMNEs with first-hand empirical evidence. The findings show that EMNEs are leapfrogging with their internationalisation and hence their expatriate policies are often ad hoc without systematic planning. Moreover, this study has contributed to practice, especially to EMNEs, regarding the way they need to improve their expatriate policies and practices.
Highlights
The global economy experienced multiple exogenous shocks over the past two decades.There is no doubt that the nature of the global economy is volatile, which results from political risk, economic risk, ecological risk such as natural disasters, and health risks such as the COVID-19 pandemic
Compared with developed economy multinational enterprises (MNEs) (DMNEs), emerging market MNEs (EMNEs) tend to maintain large international expansions given the support from the home country institutional environment (Wu and Chen 2014)
The research findings have been grouped into four issues related to expatriate management in Chinese MNEs: staffing approach, recruitment and selection, training and development and knowledge transfer
Summary
There is no doubt that the nature of the global economy is volatile, which results from political risk (e.g., terrorism, trade war and political conflicts), economic risk (e.g., dot.com bubble, global financial crisis and debt crisis), ecological risk such as natural disasters, and health risks such as the COVID-19 pandemic. These unexpected disruptions have challenged multinational enterprises (MNEs) to survive in a volatile environment. Is this still the case in a volatile environment? It deserves researchers’ special attention
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