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Keywords Expatriates, Management techniques, Human resource management, Finland
Abstract Expatriate management practices, such as selection, preparation, liaison with home country representatives, performance evaluation, repatriation, and career planning, are often found to fall short of the wishes of the expatriates themselves. Reports the results of a recent survey among Finnish expatriates operating around the world, which examined their opinions of their company's practices. The results indicate that, whilst the expatriates were not entirely satisfied with the way they were managed, the management of Finnish expatriates may be closer to prescriptions of good practice than those reported from elsewhere. Potential reasons for this are explored.
Researching IRM
International human resource management (IHM) is a developing research area: the amount of writing on the issue has increased substantially during recent years. However, despite the increasing interest in IHRM, there is still much room for better understanding of successful HRM practices in an international context, as many researchers have argued (e.g. Pucik, 1984; Dowling, 1986; Mendenhall and Oddou, 1991; Weber and Festing, 1991; Dowling et at, 1994; Boxall, 1995; De Cieri and Dowling, 1999). One important part of the IHRM literature relates to expatriation: cross-border assignments that last over a significant period of time (e.g. Black et aL, 1993; Brewster and Harris, 1999; Dowling et al., 1994; Pucik and Saba, 1998).
This article explores these issues, briefly, through the literature and uses evidence from a Finnish sample of expatriates to argue that, whilst the practice of Finnish companies do not fully meet the expectations of these expatriates, they are closer to the prescriptions in the literature than is found in the traditional US/UK samples. Potential reasons for this are explored in the final section.
The paper examines a selection of the relevant literature and draws conclusions about some of the gaps in that literature and about the prescriptions made for the management of expatriates. It then outlines the methodology that was used to explore relevant issues with a sample of Finnish expatriates and presents the findings from that research. Finally, it considers some of the implications for the management of expatriates, for the expatriates themselves and for researchers.
Managing expatriates
Research on international staffing has identified a number of principal reasons for employing HQ expatriates in multinational...