Expatriate management: Comparison of MNCs across four parent countries

This article reports the results of a study of expatriate management and headquarters-subsidiary relations in 29 American, British, German, and Japanese multinationals and a sample of 46 of their foreign subsidiaries based on face-to-face and telephone interviews with key international HR, subsidiary HR, and subsidiary managing directors. We found that earlier studies, heavily weighted with U.S. multinationals, cannot necessarily be applied to expatriate management experiences of other national industrial countries. Also, expatriate management is more similar for American and British MNCs, while both German and Japanese multinationals in our sample had fairly distinct systems of using expatriates in their foreign subsidiaries. Thus, we can discuss at least three fairly distinct models of expatriate management and corporate-foreign-subsidiary control. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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