141202047FRED

The article highlights the experience of an American manager transferred to work in Japan. The manager finds the social and business culture of Tokyo to be very different from his home country. The experience becomes so frustrating as to make him and his wife consider giving up and going back to the United States. The article offers an important case study for exploration of factors that impact effective international assignments. The article shines the light on the need for training that incorporates cultural awareness and effective business practices. The intended contribution of this article is to summarize the case and outline the international human resources practices of the firm and how they can proactively improve things for future expatriates. It examines the problem the expatriate and his family are facing and provides suggested alternatives and an implementation plan as to how the issue can be resolved.

Human Resource Management, 1989

Liaison positions in an overseas subsidiary represent a vital link to the parent com-pany. Staffing this position constitutes a critical HRh4 decision. Based on exploratory interviews conducted with personnel managers and foreign employees, we examine an emerging approach to ...

Journal of World Business, 1997

Companies with international linkages often find it necessary to use expatriates for a variety of reasons, and the success of these expatriates is frequently critical to the success of the project on which they are working. Many of these companies could potentially benefit from including the spouse in the expatriation process. For example, about 15% of expatriate candidates were reported to have rejected a foreign assignment because of their spouse's career, and this is expected to be a growing reason for rejection, especially in North America and Western Europe. This may also be true in other parts of the world, because of an increasing number of working women, and women with careers, in all parts of the world. Substantial research has indicated that spouses are particularly importunt to the success of the expatriate process, but, surprisingly, there is little research that looks at the expatriate process from the spouse's viewpoint. This is especially true for spouses with a career and with mule spouses; little is known of their situation and concerns. This paper draws on a series of research projects that do address the spouse's viewpoint to suggest practical means by which companies can improve the expatriation process by including the spouse.

LAP LAMBERT Academic Publishing, 2015

Middle management in a foreign land: experiences of Italian middle managers working as expatriates.

2012

Success: Perceptions of New Zealand Expatriates in Singapore iv

Human Resource Management, 1984

The effcient operation ofa multinational enterprise is contingent upon the availability and utilization of nwnerolcs sttaw mm-t&mbgy, mpifal, know-hout, and people. It is my contention that human power is a key ingredient to the successful operation of u multinational, without which all ...

Global Japan: The Experience of Japan's New …, 2003

The Japanese have long regarded themselves as a homogenous nation, clearly separated from other nations. The present international reality of increased global population movement, however, which has resulted in the establishment both of significant Japanese communities outside Japan, and of significant non-Japanese minorities within Japan, is undermining this long-standing view, and forcing the Japanese to re-conceptualise their nationality in new and more flexible ways.

2002

This dissertation explores various communication activities in a multinational workplace where employees from different cultures engage in and attempt to make sense of their reality, their experiences, and other cultures. Using an interpretive approach, I analyzed communicative practices based on three different levels-macro, local, and micro-in a Japanese multinational company based in the United States. The triangulation of methods, including participant observation, interviews, analysis of documents, and discourse analysis is used to understand the complex phenomena of intercultural communication at work on a global, local, and individual scale. At the macro level of analysis, I present the global ideology that a parent company tries to exert in order to shape organizational actors' sense-making, and influence their work attitude and vi motivation. Their relationality with the external world and the power relationship between the parent company and its subsidiary are highlighted. At the local level of analysis, I demonstrate a bicultural workplace and its constituent members' learning and active negotiation by identifying mono-cultural, bicultural, negotiated, and shared cultural practices, which are likely to exist when two distinct national cultures come together in one organization. A macro level of analysis explores organizational members' face-to-face communication, including terms of address, language issues, stereotypical images toward one's own and other nationals, humor, and videoconferences. By looking at intercultural communication from the above three levels of analysis, this study shows that cultural factors, such as a shared ideology, goal, history, membership, or expectation, and habitualized practices influence successful interactions at work, regardless of members' different cultural and linguistic backgrounds. In contrast, members from different cultures still retain mental cultural images or possibly conflicting perceptions and must constantly negotiate which is right, which is better, and which is the American or the Japanese way. Intercultural communication in the workplace is not a one time interaction, but an on-going activity involving habitualization, relationaility, and contextuality. This dissertation suggests both what should be emphasized in a practical sense when working with intercultural members of a working environment and attempting to find a middle ground, and what should be considered academically when studying intercultural communication in a multinational workplace in the future.

The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 2002

The present study was designed to better understand the antecedents and consequences of expatriate adjustment in an international assignment. The researchers surveyed Japanese expatriates assigned to the United States.