Cross-cultural management performance elements in the expatriate context.

• Author: Woods, Peter R.

1. INTRODUCTION

   Managing across cultures is an increasingly important skill for business leaders in this globalising world. Expatriates in particular, must effectively manage organisations and individuals across the cultural divide if they are to achieve long-term success in the host country. The unique aspects of cross-cultural management in the expatriate context deserve careful consideration, as the elements should be able to describe and outline the elements of cross-cultural management in the expatriate context. This paper addresses the problem of how to define the elements of the effective performance of expatriate managers.

   Managerial performance elements have, for many years, been framed in terms of predictor constructs (Klimoski, 1993) or competencies (Boyatzis, 1982; Yukl, 1998) or performance elements (Fraser, 1999). Predictor constructs have been defined as "some aspect of a person which, if assessed, has relevance to predicting (or understanding) future behaviour or performance" (Klimoski, 1993, p. 101). Predictor constructs are essentially personal constructs that have common meaning (Borman, 1987) and they are often categorised according to their perceived levels of permanence (Ackerman & Humphries, 1991). A personality trait, for example, is a relatively stable predictor construct, whereas cultural awareness is relatively malleable and responsive to training. The term 'performance elements' will be used in this paper rather than 'predictor construct' or 'competency' as this research attempts to look more broadly at the individual and contextual aspects that influence cross-cultural management.

2. LITERATURE REVIEW

   2.1 Criteria for Selecting Cross-Cultural Performance Elements

   This section will review the literature to identify a number of factors to consider when selecting a list of management performance elements relevant to cross-cultural management. First, the element must be relevant to the role of a cross-cultural manager. Second, the element must be perceived similarly by raters from different cultural and contextual backgrounds. Finally, the element should have been tested empirically in the cross-cultural context by raters from relevant cultural perspectives. We will now explore each of these factors in turn.

   When relating performance elements to cross-cultural management, there are three common approaches. The first approach relates cross-cultural management performance elements to cross-cultural adjustment (Black, Gregersen, Mendenhall, & Stroh, 1999; Tucker, Bonial, & Lahti, 2004) . The second approach relates cross-cultural management performance elements to intercultural communication (Elashmawi & Harris, 1998; Mead, 1998). This research paper contends that adjustment and cross-cultural communication are only part of cross-cultural management performance. The third approach presents multiple laundry lists of 'must-have' competencies of cross-cultural management (Adler & Bartholomew, 1992; Ronen, 1989). Some authors have been critical of the multiple 'laundry lists' of 'must-have' competencies for cross-cultural managers as the lists do not have an underlying model that links the characteristics to effective management (Bird & Osland, 2004). This research paper joins with this criticism, and adds that most of these lists are not based on empirical research connected with the management context. In fact, most of these wish lists justify the inclusion of competencies by citing other research which is also based on non-empirical wish lists of competencies (Adler & Bartholomew, 1992).

   As well as being relevant to the manager's role as a cross-cultural manager, the meaning of the element must be perceived similarly by raters from different cultural and contextual backgrounds (Ryan, Chan, Ployhart, & Allen, 1998). For example, the performance element of 'shows respect to subordinates' could be perceived as giving the subordinate autonomy in decision making in low context cultures, whereas the same element could be seen as giving gentle direction in some high context cultures. Meanings of elements could be examined by interviews with expatriates and host country nationals to ascertain how these elements are perceived. Respondents could explain their perceptions of what is important in cross-cultural management. Some preliminary interview research has explored this (Woods, 2004), however the research was limited to a multinational sample of just 64 participants and so further research is needed.

   In addition to the element being relevant to the manager's role and having similar meaning to raters from different backgrounds, the element should have ideally been tested empirically in the cross-cultural context by raters from relevant cultural perspectives (Selmer, 1997). Unfortunately, this requirement is difficult to fulfil, as very little empirical research from these perspectives has been reported in the literature (Shay, 2000).

   2.2 Distinguishing Types of Performance Criteria

   The concept of individual managerial performance has been differentiated into two areas: task performance and contextual performance (Borman & Motowidlo, 1993; Campbell, McCloy, Oppler, & Sager, 1993; Motowidlo & Van Scotter, 1994; Neal & Griffin, 1999). Task performance is defined as effectiveness in meeting job objectives and technical competence, whereas contextual performance is defined as effectiveness in performing aspects of the job that go beyond task specific issues and relate to the social, organisational or cultural context (Motowidlo & Van Scotter, 1994). Although task performance is an important part of expatriate performance evaluation, the concept of contextual performance aligns more closely to the broader issues of people management associated with cross-cultural management performance (Woods, 2004).

   These two components of performance, however, may not be easily distinguishable when evaluating the performance of cross-cultural expatriate managers. For example, contextual factors such as host country economic and political factors may affect task performance results such as efficiency and return on investment (ROI). Yet the distinction may help to explain how an expatriate manager with excellent technical skills can still fail on assignment due to poor contextual performance.

   The concepts of task and contextual performance are related to hard (outcome based), soft (subjective criteria) and contextual criteria (situational factors related to employee performance) identified by Gregersen, Hite & Black (1996). This research project believes that it is important to consider all of these criteria when examining CCM. Soft criteria are based on subjective judgements and may include relationship or trait based factors (Gregersen et al., 1996). Adler (2002) suggests that these criteria, such as cross-cultural communication effectiveness or effectiveness in creating cultural synergy, are key determinants in cross-cultural management performance. Contextual criteria look specifically at the relevant variables of the situation where the manager is performing (Gregersen et al., 1996). The unique contextual nature of cross-cultural management highlights the importance of this criterion.

   Hard criteria (or outcome-based criteria) include net income, return on investment, budget adherence, sales growth, and cost reduction. These outcomes are difficult to evaluate in terms of expatriate performance for a number of reasons. Some of the reasons include reporting and control procedures from the home office that are unsuitable in the host country due to economic, business system and cultural differences (Black, Gregersen, & Mendenhall, 1992). For these reasons, therefore, hard criteria is often used to evaluate the performance of an overseas subsidiary, rather than individual managers (Borkowski, 1999) due to the complexity of factors influencing outcome based criteria. With these difficulties in mind, however, it is still reasonable that individual expatriate managers should reach relevant organisational goals measured by hard criteria (Black & Gregersen, 1999; Harrison & Shaffer, 2005).

   2.3 Performance Elements and the Job Context in Expatriation

   Managerial performance elements have been combined to form management competency frameworks where job competencies can be generic and applicable across work situations (Boyatzis, 1982; Yukl, 1998). However, critics of the competency framework (e.g. Bramming & Larsen, 2000) suggest that knowledge, skills and abilities need to be developed in a workplace situation context. These researchers propose that the work group itself defines the relevant knowledge, skills and abilities in groupings of "personal, functional, and social/ contextual" (Bramming & Larsen, 2000, p.83). They suggest an internal or external process consultant develops these competencies in conjunction with the work group. The organic nature of work teams might mean that this is a continuous process. Bramming & Larsen (2000) also believe the process of developing context specific competencies needs theoretical and empirical grounding. In essence, this process emphasises the importance of context based performance criteria in cross-cultural management. The process also involves establishing task-based performance criteria to evaluate expatriate's performance.

   Previous research has examined the contextual influence of establishing performance criteria in the expatriate context. Suutari & Tahvanainen's (2002) research on 301 Finnish expatriate engineers, found that expatriates were typically able to set context specific task goals and subsequent performance criteria in consultation with their host country and home country managers. This contrasts with previous research (Black et al., 1992) where expatriates had little input into setting their performance criteria. These findings suggest the need for further research to establish if this trend applies to expatriates other than Finnish engineers and more...