BUS707: Expatriate Training Programs are Necessary to Ensure Effective Communication: Managing Across Cultures Assignment, UCD

Assignment Overview:

Do you ever need to relocate employees for international assignments? Here’s how and why you should tailor your company’s classes for expatriates.

Expatriate training programs are necessary to ensure effective communication in the international business realm.

Basic expatriate training should include aspects such as culture, laws, and language.

Many ex-pat training courses focus on helping families establish housing, find the best education programs for their children, and more.

Some of the benefits of training an ex-pat are that you can eliminate the waste of resources and ensure a great performance.

Expatriate education and training are necessary for a global marketplace to ensure effective communication and business success. Expatriate training programs within your company could include language courses, international business development, or cultural communications – but don’t leave out the most personal aspect of international assignments. Often, it’s a family’s inability to adapt that leads to initial assignment hiccups. Focus your expatriates’ training on business issues, certainly, but also provide information that involves your employees’ spouses and children.

1. Begin expatriates’ training at the cultural level to emphasize communication and eliminate cultural missteps.
2. Continue expatriate training and family education with comprehensive programs that offer support for the length of the assignment.
3. Conclude courses for expatriates with repatriation training.

What Are the Opposing Reasons for the polycentric Approach of Staffing?

Imagine your business is growing at a rapid pace – so rapid, in fact, that you decide to go international.

Establishing retail outlets, manufacturing facilities or distribution partners abroad opens up your business to new markets, new resources and new avenues for profit. For human resources, however, presents certain challenges. How do you staff the company’s operations abroad? How do you manage them? One option is to turn operations over to host-country managers using a staffing system known as the polycentric approach. Done properly, the polycentric model can help you reduce costs and respond to local cultures.

While it is cheaper and more successful to use local managers than to expatriate managers from the home nation, the polycentric approach has a tendency to isolate the subsidiary from the company’s headquarters and managers face an unbreakable glass ceiling.

International people management is challenging. Find out why pre-departure training for expatriates is essential for their success.

International human resources can be a complex and challenging area. Unprecedented political events, such as Brexit, bring uncertainty in global economics that may impact your multinational organization. Still, you must continue to focus on increasingly mobile talent and the integration of people management processes to make doing business at a global scale a success.

If your organization has staff on international assignments, we are sure you are aware of the difficulties of managing expatriate employees. Assignment failure due to expatriate challenges settling into their new home or role is estimated to be in the region of 25-40%, costing US companies an estimated $2 billion a year. This is a worrying statistic, but there are ways to mitigate failure. By providing thorough pre-departure training for potential expatriates so they can better anticipate the problems that may lie ahead and plan for success.

Questions

Drawing on the information and what we covered in the modules please answer ANY 4 OF THE 6 QUESTIONS. These answers will provide guidance and make recommendations to a Multinational company. Each of the questions will focus on a different aspect of successful organizational management and cross-cultural interactions.

Question 1 

Culture could play an important role in developing a competitive advantage. Discuss how the culture of the organization can lead to a competitive advantage for an international organization?

• Discuss culture in general.
• Discuss the organizational culture.
• Discuss the issues around culture and the choice of the potential partner, customer, or marketplace.

Question 2 

Explain why staffing issues and IHRM can become more complex in a global workplace. You also need to make recommendations on how international managers could approach cross-cultural recruitment and workforce planning for the international organization.

Question 3 

Discuss the issues around an ethnocentric, polycentric, and regiocentric approach to staffing. Make recommendations to a US international organization wanting to expand operations into China. Focus on what they need to consider when choosing any one of those approaches.

Question 4 

Write a strategy for an international organization on how they could potentially approach the expatriate appointment process.

• Discuss the different stages of the appointment process.
• Discuss the different stakeholders involved.
• Discuss the support needed throughout the process.

Question 5 

Discuss the main culture shock issues that the initial workforce might face in returning home. Make recommendations on how the international organization could structure this process and what should be included.

Question 6 

A global management framework is useful to an international organization to manage some of the challenges that global teams face.

• Explain what a global mindset is; and how this could be developed.
• Explain how having a global management framework will influence the management of ethical dilemmas.