Why Do Multinationals Use Expatriation?

1.0 INTRODUCTION
The competitiveness of multinationals requires them to be able to manage their activities in all their subsidiaries effectively. This is key as about 50% of multinationals stream of earnings are acquired outside of their home country. This therefore requires efficient and effectiveness in their management style to help coordinate and integrate organisational goals throughout all subsidiaries. Indeed, it has been established diverse ways that management of subsidiaries can be achieved; either by the use of home country national or host country national. Expatriation which is the use of home country nationals in foreign subsidiaries usually between a period of two to five year as shown by literatures from International Human Resource Management (IHRM) is mostly practised (Harzing, 2001). This paper seeks to explore the role and the general reasons for using expatriates and as well as some challenges multinational faced in using expatriates in the achievement of their strategic goals. The

It must be noted that the challenges in particular may have some dire consequences on the strategic goals of multinational which has made many researchers questioned the appropriateness of expatriation. Nonetheless multinationals stand to gain much competitive advantages over their rivals through a proper review of expatriation programmes.
It can be said that the challenges as reveal by previous research work may manifest differently from one company to the other. Thus multinationals that are able to familiarise themselves with some of these generally cited challenges will be able to come out successfully when they find themselves in similar situations. They can typically isolate each of these challenges and gain a better understanding as to what actually leads to that and its consequences on the future goals of the