Crossing Borders with Personnel Selection: From Expatriates to Multicultural Teams

Personnel selection is one of the main activities of the industrial and organizational psychologist. Yet, little is known about whether principles of personnel selection that have been developed in domestic and mainly Western (i.e., North American and European) contexts will apply in intercultural workplaces, such as those faced by expatriates. The present dissertation presents one theoretical investigation and four empirical studies into personnel selection in the intercultural and ‘alter’ cultural context, with a particular focus on both the predictors and the criteria that may be successfully employed for the selection of expatriates. In this introductory chapter, Binning and Barrett’s (1989) elaborated model for personnel decisions research is used to frame the different chapters in this dissertation. Next, this opening chapter introduces some of the main characteristics of constructs employed in the subsequent chapters. In all, three research questions that will be addressed in Chapters 2-7 are posed. These are: 1) Can performance be adequately and accurately assessed in the cross-cultural industrial and organizational psychological context (i.e. across jobs and cultural contexts), and can it be related to individual differences variables that might be employed for purposes of personnel selection? 2) Can the Five Factor Model (FFM) dimensions be usefully employed as predictors of various outcomes (i.e., job and training performance and expatriation willingness) within the crosscultural industrial-organizational psychological context? And, 3) Will predictors that match the criterion in specificity and content demonstrate a higher redictive validity than predictors that do not

On Expatriate Effectiveness and Goofy Criteria

While performance is quintessential to assessing expatriate effectiveness, significant domestic advances in performance measurement have seldom been applied to evaluating expatriate training and selection practices. In addition to a critical assessment of expatriate effectiveness research, this theoretical paper voices concerns about the conversion of domestic performance taxonomies, and offers solutions

Het Meten van Werkprestaties van Internationale Managers : Vraagstellingen en Proposities Rond de Ontwikkeling van Criteria voor Selectie en Training

De doelstelling van dit theoretische artikel is om een innovatieve methode te beramen voor de ontwikkeling van valide en bruikbare criteria voor het vaststellen van de effectiviteit van internationale managers. Valide criteria zijn onontbeerlijk voor de ontwikkeling van valide predictoren en de evaluatie van training. Op basis van een beknopte literatuurbeschouwing zal worden betoogd dat reeds uitgevoerd onderzoek naar de voorspelling en training van de effectiviteit van internationale managers, wordt geteisterd door criteria met een twijfelachtige utiliteit en/of dubieuze begripsgerelateerde validiteit. Vervolgens zal worden beargumenteerd dat de aannames en doelstellingen die ten grondslag hebben gelegen aan conventioneel onderzoek, de ontwikkeling van criteria en predictoren die daadwerkelijk door de HRM afdelingen van multinationals kunnen worden geïmplementeerd, in de weg hebben gestaan. De aannames die de revue zullen passeren hebben betrekking op culturele, inhoudelijke en methodologische aspecten van criteria. Een voorgestelde herziening en herdefinitie van de gebruikelijke aannames en hun integratie met recente ideeën vanuit de personeelspsychologie zal leiden tot verscheidene proposities voor toekomstig onderzoek naar de effectiviteit van expatriates

A study of the adjustment of Western expatriates in Taiwan ROC with the Multicultural Personality Questionnaire (MPQ)

The present paper examined the validity of the Multicultural Personality Questionnaire (MPQ). As criteria of validity three levels of adjustment were used. The study took place among a sample of expatriates (N = 102) during their assignment in Taiwan. The MPQ has scales for cultural empathy, open-mindedness, social initiative, emotional stability and flexibility. The MPQ-scales appeared to be positively related to expatriates' personal, professional and social adjustment. In all three domains, emotional stability appeared most consistently as predictor of adjustment. Social initiative was an additional strong predictor of psychological well-being, and so was cultural empathy of satisfaction with life and of the amount of social support in the host country. Flexibility was a predictor of job satisfaction and social support. The study also examined the effects of marital status on adjustment. Married expatriates showed higher levels of adjustment than expatriates who were single or separated