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Sloan Management Review Winter 1986

Sloan Management Review Winter 1986

Alice Haller Murray is a principal in FAM Associates. Ms. Murray holds the B.S. degree from Rogers College and the M. A. degree from St. Louis Univer-sity. She has had twenty years' experi-ence in consulting and administration, specializing in organi-zational improvement and training for inter-cultural understanding and compeience. Ms. Murray has worked on such projects as equip-pingU .S. piuieaoiuudlS for overseas assign-ments, analyzing lan* guage learning needs, designing and setting up languageand orien-tation centers, team building, and resolving intergroup conflicts. She has tived and worked in Latin America.

assemble a group for training, which many companies mistakenly assume can only be done in a group. But apparently it is the skepticism of many companies regarding the value of training for overseas that principally explains their neglect of it. These companies have learned by experience that informational briefing on a country makes little dif-ference in the subseąuent performance of overseas personnel.

19 Research corroborates the logie of their view. Informational briefings don’t come to grips with the principal causes of failure. These, as mentioned above, are the entire family’s inability to be comfortable in a new environment and the employee’s inability ta relate effectively to business and business associates in a foreign environment. Obvi-ously, therefore, training for overseas, if it is to be worthwhile and cost effective, has to go beyond mere informational briefing. It needs to be training that targets the real needs of the expatriate, both job-related and familial, and focuses on the acąuisition and practice of the special skills reąuisite for making a successful transition to working and living in an unfamiliar country.

?o The need for such training will not end soon. Although many expatriate personnel are being replaced by host country nationals, the inereasing globalization of business and the need for effective links with corporate headąuarters is producing an inerease in the total number of Americans working over-seas. Obviously there’s a place for training programs that can reduce the high failure ratę among American expatriates along with its concomitant costs.

2t Morę is at stake than reducing the number of failures. In our increasingly competitive global economy and market, an effective worldwide presence is a necessity for any company that is not re^dy to relinąuish the field to the Japanese and others. Upgrading host country nationals to higher level posi-tions is an important part of establishing a truły global, transnational presence. But it is not enough. For an American company to properly manage overseas operations, it needs American managers and technicians

customs, ways of doing business, and socio-economic systems. Success for the expatriate, who has grown up and been socialized in a different culture, comes only after he has built an understanding of this new context and madę adjustments in his previous way of working.

is Also reąuisite for success overseas are cop-ing skills, which enable a person to become reasonably comfortable, or at least survive, in a foreign environment. Not only the expa-triate employee, but also his family, need these. Unless they learn to do without things easily available in the home country and to accept, respect, and eventually even enjoy unfamiliar and inconvenient customs and procedures, "culture fatigue" plays havoc with personal and family life and saps the energies of the expatriate employee. i7 Japanese companies, we have seen, recog-nizing the importance of effectiveness and coping skills, make a considerable invest-ment to enable their expatriates to acąuire them. American companies seem to ignore the critical importance of these skills, and evidence of this is their record of preparing expatriates for the transitian to living and working overseas. Roughly 68 percent of American companies have no formal training programs to prepare personnel for over-seas work. Of the 32 percent who do have formal training programs, the majority limit the training to informational briefing that provides a basie understanding of the country^ sociopolitical history, geography, State of economic development, cultural institu-tions, and living conditions.⁵

Training That Pays

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ia American companies have their reasons for not investing morę heavily in preparing ex-patriates and their families for overseas as-signments. Many, because of a policy of re-placing expatriate personnel with host country nationals, send fewer people overseas than formerly. Also, sińce people assigned overseas freąuently go out one or two at a time, it becomes awkward or impractical to

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