What is the role of expatriates in Mnes?

At iGain Recruitment we value and believe in quantity over quality and only introduce candidates that are the right fit for your business. This can include candidates from a number of different countries. We at iGain understand the importance of expatriates and how it can benefit an organisation as we don’t have clients we build partnerships, we understand that our partners are key, and we strive to put you first.

An expatriate is defined as any individual who relocates from his/her home base to an international location for business or work purposes and sets up temporary residence in the host country. There has been an increase into the number of millennials wanting to work outside their home country. It was found that India, South Africa and Turkey was found to have the highest percentage of millennials who wanted to work outside of their home country during their career increasing the number of of expatriates within multinational organisations. The more the employees are transferred across boundaries, the better they become skilled at career competencies and labour market values, they are termed as mobile professional. The main motives for transferring staff across seas can be to:

• To fill positions, which concerns the transfer of technical and managerial knowledge
• Management development 
• Coordination and control
• Development of global leadership competences

Expatriate as an international assignment

As a method of developing globally competent leaders, expatriation (cross-border assignments) is regarded as one of the most powerful strategies. From an organisation perspective, multinational companies use the international assignment for a variety of strategic reasons:

1. To improve expatriates’ general management skills and intercultural competencies
2. To coordinate and control their activities
3. To transmit and disseminate organisational knowledge
4. To exploit technology and innovation
5. Within multinational companies, the international assignment is also increasingly viewed as part of an individual’s career progression

Essential components of pre-departure training

It is important when thinking about moving to another country for your career or sending a candidate to a host country that they undertake pre-departure training to avoid culture shock. Such training can include cultural awareness training, preliminary visits, language instruction assistance with practical day-to-day matters and security briefings. Such training can increase the cultural intelligence of expatriates making the process of adjusting to new work ethic and culture easier.

Research on expatriates

• 18% of all expats are assigned for developmental purposes
• 32% of all expats are ‘top performers’ 
• Average international assignment length is 29 months
• Continued increase in the level of international assignments
• International assignment cost is US$311,000pa
• Only 4% of assignments are terminated early
• There is a 13% net performance improvement of expats on assignment
• 24% of all Board/Exec level employees have international expertise
• Organisations lose up to 40% of returned assignees within 12 months 
• 23.7% of returned expats promoted in first year of repatriation

Alternatives to expatriation

There are increasing signs that barriers to mobility especially the issue of dual-career, couples are becoming more and more important, leading to some decline in the willingness to accept an assignment abroad. In addition, expatriates can be very costly.Increasingly, companies are therefore looking for alternatives to expatriation that include, for example, inpatriate, short-term, self-initiated and virtual transfers.

We present a multilevel conceptual framework of expatriate knowledge utilization. Drawing from the resource-based view and multilevel approaches to expatriate utilization, we describe how individual expatriate characteristics (task-related and intercultural competencies, and motivation to transfer knowledge) and international adjustment, as well as subsidiary characteristics (absorptive capacity and knowledge sustainability) influence knowledge transfer effectiveness. We also draw from outward knowledge transfer and expatriate learning perspectives to address the cyclical nature of the process. As such, we include the effect of expatriate learning not only in continued knowledge flows to the subsidiary, but also in knowledge flows to the home division. We offer several implications for research on practice, including the notion that knowledge transfer to the subsidiary should continue upon repatriation, and that outward knowledge transfer can begin before repatriation. The framework reiterates that expatriates are valuable human capital and a source of sustained competitive advantage to the MNE.

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