Cultural and Bureaucratic Control in MNEs: The Role of Expatriate Performance Management

Exploring the adjustment of American expatriate spouses in Germany

“…The underlying motives for expatriation vary: the transfer of know-how from headquarters to subsidiaries abroad, compensation for a shortage of qualified local personnel in a given host country or an attempt to exert control over subsidiaries abroad and standardize routines across organizational units are among frequently cited reasons for sending managers abroad (Iles and Yolles, 2002;Legewie, 2002;Torbiörn, 1994). More recently, new forms of organizing the activities of multinational companies, such as network structures or heterarchies, call for an increased exchange of personnel between organizational units to ensure that all parts of the company contribute to reaching the firm's overall strategic objective (Bartlett and Ghoshal, 1987;Fenwick et al, 1999;Hedlund, 1986;Holtbruegge, 2001;Manev and William, 2001). A more general objective can be seen in companies' desire to enhance their international competence by increasing the international exposure of managers and the development of 'global leaders' (Caligiuri et al, 1998;Mendenhall, 2001;Mendenhall et al, 2002).…”

Linguistic gender marking gap and female staffing at MNC’s

“…Guest (1989) and Ohmae (1994) acknowledged organisational culture as a condition that brings organisations together. Prior research (e. g., Gatignon & Anderson, 1988) identified the cultural distance between the home and host countries as a major predictor of subsidiary control and/or expatriate deployment (Boyacigiller, 1990;Fenwick, DeCieri, & Welch, 1999;Kobrin, 1988;Richards, 2001). This paper present an innovative gender gap variable based on difference in grammatical structures in languages related to gender, which contributes a better way of capturing the cultural gap than the survey based measured of culture.…”

Managing multinational corporations through compensation: The risk-sharing contract method

“…There is extensive research on cultural distance (CD) in international business, including subsidiary control and/or expatriate deployment (Boyacigiller, 1990;Brock et al, 2008;Fenwick, DeCieri, & Welch, 1999;Kobrin, 1988;Richards, 2001). When CD is very large, the distance becomes too costly because of information asymmetry (Gong, 2003).…”