Dealing With Dual Career Couples: A Tool for Accepting and Making International Assignments Effective

Abstract

The study seeks to explore existing literature on how MNCs are dealing with dual career couples for international assignees to accept international assignment and what these MNCs have not been able to provide so that contribution can be made to the existing literature. The study was exploratory research where the contributions of various authors were assessed to determine if dual career couples pose a threat for international assignees to accept international assignment. The exploration reveals that MNCs need to deal with issues associated with dual career couples since it contribute significantly to the rejection of international assignments. There are various strategies MNCs adopt in order to entice the international assignee’s spouse to give his or her blessing to the international assignment and mainly among them captured in the literature are providing a lump sum payment for the trailing spouse, inter-firm networking, assisting the trailing spouse to find job in the host country, engaging in reciprocal arrangement with other MNCs to find job for the trailing spouse in the host country and providing career support in order to make the trailing spouse skills, knowledge and abilities relevant to the host country job market. The study identified two strategies that could be used to deal with dual career couples which were not captured in the literature and these are the active involvement of the expatriate spouses in the recruitment and selection process and the use of virtual assignments by relying on the availability of technology for international assignments.