Expats
Introduction
Taking a closer look into today’s organizations, one common thing for all companies is that they all combine different physical, as well as, financial assets combined with managerial and technical processes to perform some form of work.
Expatriation is not a new concept businesses were usually driven by international divisions that supervised the export issues, licensing and subsidiaries abroad. The main role of corporate human resource department was to make it easier to select staff for foreign post-ings. To find employees that were familiar with the activities and products of the company, organization, culture and also at the same time comfortable with working abroad (Evans, Pucik & Barsoux, 2002).
An expatriate is an employee that is temporarily working and living in a country or region that is not his or her home country. Reasons as to why organizations wants to use expatriates are mainly that organizational control and coordination are maintained and facilitated, managers are given international experience, expatriates from the parent country may be best suited for the job because of their skills and experience, and it will be assured that subsidiary complies with the company’s objectives and policies
the parent firm has values and beliefs, visions and strategies that they want to communicate through the whole organization. The best way to transfer these factors is through someone that has a clear understanding of the parent company.
International assignments are viewed as a way of conducting in-terpersonal linkages that can be used for informal control and communication pur-poses. An expatriate that works as a network builder will possess knowledge that is of value for the company. Knowing people from different key positions and what they need as well as these people know what the expatriate is credible for, when performing a task, there is a mutual dependence...
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