How Culture Is Related to Failure or Success

A student writes an analytical summary of the Harvard Business Review Article "Expatriate Assignments: Enhancing Success and Minimizing Failure"

Nowadays expatriate assignments have become a common practice for different kinds of multinational companies, especially when they have foreign operations or want to have different strategies to expand market share in a specific country. But what companies don't know is that this practice can be a “double edged sword” and the success of itself is related to the culture.

The article “Expatriate Assignments: Enhancing Success and Minimizing Failure” is an excellent article that shows with strong studies and figures the rate of success and failure for two different cultural groups: The American culture and the European & Japanese culture. The two cultural groups are very different in key aspects which are drivers of success or failure such as: ethnocentrism, self reference criteria and the role of companies within the culture.

Ethnocentrism is the belief that the own culture or company has the best way to perform or do things. A self reference criterion is the unconscious reference of cultural values, experiences and principles to make decisions. Role of the companies within a culture: how companies perform and influence the behavior of people. Starting with a description of the American culture, the following facts can be enhanced:

• Americans have a high ethnocentric feeling. They are narrow-minded in terms of thinking that the best way to do things is their own. 
• Americans are individualists and each person thinks in his/her own benefits even if those are above the community benefits.  
• Americans are competitive and want to excel in many cases regardless of how they obtain results.
• Americans are “immediatists” and want results in short terms in all life aspects, like when a person wants to lose weight and start a diet, he/she will expect results at least in a month otherwise he/she will get frustrated.

Since companies are part of the culture, they also want short term results. Companies are only the place where you work and only a temporary place to stay at until you find a better opportunity. According to the previous facts, American companies have expatriate assignments with a preparation that in some cases is not the best one, often leading to failures. American companies, from the beginning of the selection process, choose people with high technical skills no matter how good the personal skills are, and the trainings given are basic, including some political, geographic and financial information. Once the person gets into the new country, he/she realizes that the training was not enough and that he/she is expected to perform well and obtain good results immediately, but the reality is different: the results take more time and the expatriate needs more time to adapt to the new culture first.

The second cultural group analyzed is kind of the opposite from the American, and so are the results that are obtained. The European & Japanese culture can be described with the following facts:

•  European & Japanese culture has an ethnocentric feeling as well, with the difference that they are open-minded and in most of the cases people want to learn about different cultures. A good example of this behavior is that the majority of the people know at least a second language since high school. 
• European & Japanese, especially Japanese, are group oriented, and they think first in the community benefits than in their personal ones.  
• The competitiveness feeling is not as strong as in the American culture.
• European & Japanese culture don't expect immediate results. They are conscious that the good things take time to be achieved.
• Companies are like the second home. They are very paternalistic. Since people there have really low rotation rate, the employees have a high sense of belonging.

The mentioned facts are the strongest reasons why the expatriate assignments for this kind of culture have a lower failure rate than for the Americans. European and Japanese companies start the selection process based on the personal skills rather than the technical. The training given is focused on the foreign country culture, experiencing with real people from the foreign country and coexisting with them in a training environment. Not only is the political, geographic and financial information given but also the language, beliefs and behavior.

The support from the home company is stronger, and the community feeling is the sense that will make people make things work for the community welfare. People from Europe and Japan also have the challenge to adapt and perform well to the new culture. The preparation, the support from people who have passed thought the same experience and the low pressure to obtain short term results are the key to get easily adapted.

Once the person gets adapted he/she can start to perform well and the rest will flow naturally!

Natalia