Expatriate Preparation

Selection and intercultural pre-departure training of expatriate managers send to Japan

1. Introduction

“Much of what we know about managing cultural differences at an individual level comes from the experience of expatriates […].” (Scheider, Barsoux 2003:186)
In today’s globalized world international cooperation and communication continues to get more and more important and complex. One important tool for companies at that is the use of expatriate managers.
The term expatriation means, that a professional or manager, is temporary transferred from the parent company to a subsidiary in a foreign country, for longer than six month. The most common goals for an expatriation are the promotion of know-how transfer, training for local managers and the promotion of an employee’s career, or it can serve as compensation for a lack of native managers.

Estimations start from less than 10 % and go up to 50 %. In case of Japan, the situation seems to be even severe.
These high failure rates, combined with the high costs of expatriations are some of the most important reasons why many scholars examined the topic of the selection and training of expatriates, in order to detect factors that will help companies to improve the prospects of success for their expatriations.
In this essay I will evaluate the available literature on the selection and intercultural pre-departure training for expatriate managers with a special focus on expatriate managers send to Japan.
Therefore I will first illustrate my topic with a case study of an U.S. expatriate manager send to Japan. I will then, in the first main part of this essay, elaborate on criteria for the selection of expatriate managers as recommended by scholars and used by companies. In the second main part, I will outline the most common types of intercultural pre-departure