The Effect of Culture on Expatriate Deployment Levels: Cultural Distance and Tightness-Looseness

Abstract

Prior research on the relationship between cultural distance and control (specifically: expatriate deployment) has produced inconsistent findings. We attend to this by comparing some of the conflicting findings and juxtaposing the recently introduced cultural tightness-looseness concept with the dominant pre-existing cultural distance measure. By utilizing a longitudinal research approach we find that cultural distance forms a U-shaped relationship with expatriate deployment, while cultural tightness-looseness forms a negative-linear relationship with expatriate deployment. The findings explain the conflicting empirical results from prior research. In addition, the findings suggest that cultural distance and cultural tightness-looseness are distinctive from one another and thus should be used independently in future research.