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The International Human Resource Management literature has paid less attention to the selection of expatriates and the decision-making criteria with regard to such selection, than to issues relating to expatriates’ role, performance, adjustment, success, and failure. Yet, before expatriates commence their assignments, they need to be selected. The purpose of this book chapter is to provide an overview of issues related specifically to expatriate selection. In particular, the chapter traces the chronological development of selection over the last five decades or so, from prior to 1970 until present. The chapter subsequently identifies five expatriate selection criteria that have been applied in regard to traditional international assignments, but are also relevant to alternative assignments.

We begin by reviewing expatriate selection historically and its position within expatriate management based on changing business environments. Then, drawing from over five decades of literature on international assignments, we identify and discuss five organizational, individual, and contextual level criteria for selecting expatriates.

Emphasis on different issues tends to characterize expatriate selection during the various decades since the literature has taken up the topic. The chapter describes those issues, following a chronological perspective. In addition, the chapter organizes the various selection criteria in five clusters: organization philosophy, technical competence, relational abilities, personal characteristics, and spouse and family situation.

While there are studies on expatriate selection, there is more to be understood with regard to the topic. Provided all other expatriation phases are subsequent, if selection is not understood in detail, the foundations of studying phases and processes that take place once expatriates are selected may not be sound. While the scholarly conversations of other expatriate-related issues should continue, the international human resource management literature can absorb more analyses on selection. A better understanding of expatriate selection will assist its better management. The chapter provides a basis for human resource management professionals to be able to map the various criteria for selection, and decide, under particular circumstances, which ones to prioritize and why.

The chapter brings clarity to a topic that has remained less researched when compared to other areas of interest related to expatriates and their international assignments by tracing the historical development of this important phase of the expatriation process. In addition, the chapter organizes a number of selection criteria along five core areas and discusses each of them to gain insights that help explain expatriate selection in greater detail.

We review 25 years of research on expatriate experiences concentrating on expatriate adjustment as a central construct, and relying on a general stressor-stress-strain framework. First, we consider who expatriates are, why their experiences differ from domestic employees, and what adjustment is. Conceptualizing (mal)adjustment in terms of stress, we next review the stressors and strains associated with it. Consolidating the wide range of antecedents (anticipatory and in-country) that have been studied to date, we note major patterns of effects and their implications for how HR managers can facilitate adjustment. Although relatively less research has focused on the consequences of adjustment, enough evidence exists to establish a bottom-line impact of poor adjustment on performance. To stimulate future efforts to understand the experiences of expatriates, we discuss the challenges and opportunities of continuing down this road of research.

The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of SIEs’ career development through international assignment. In particular, the research focus is on career capital acquirement and development of SIEs through their international assignment in China.

We review studies on SIEs and comparative studies between SIEs and OEs. We apply the career capital theory to discuss SIEs’ career capital development in terms of knowing-how, knowing-why and knowing-whom through expatriation assignment in China.

This chapter focuses on SIEs’ career capital accumulation through international assignments in China, and we develop three propositions that will guide future studies: the knowing-whom career capital development of SIEs through expatriation is increased more in network quantity than network quality in China; the knowing-why career capital development of SIEs through expatriation is influenced by the age and career stage of SIEs; and the knowing-how career capital development of SIEs through expatriation — task-related skills and local engagement skills — is influenced by the SIE’s intercultural ability and organization support respectively.

In practice, a better understanding of SIEs’ career capital development in terms of knowing-how, knowing-why and knowing-whom help companies make the decision to select the relevant staffing pattern. This study also has practical implications in relation to the design and selection of the training, learning and development activities provided to the employees.

The chapter contributes to the expatriate management literature by focusing on SIEs’ career development through their international assignment in China. SIEs’ career development is related to their cross-cultural adjustment and has impacts on the completion and success of the expatriation assignment.

International experience (IE) has been acknowledged to be the most useful method for developing global leaders. However, not everyone benefits equally from IE. During the last two decades, our understanding of why this is the case and how global leaders learn from IE has rapidly increased. Several individual and organizational enablers facilitating global leader learning from IE have been identified in the literature, as have learning mechanisms that make such learning possible. However, the literature remains fragmented, and there is a great need to integrate the findings in the field. Therefore, the present paper systematically examines peer-reviewed studies on global leaders' learning from IE published between 1998 and 2019. The study contributes to the extant literature by identifying and integrating individual enablers, organizational enablers, and key learning mechanisms from global leaders' IE and by suggesting topics for future research.

Globalization requires business leaders who can manage effectively in multicultural environments. Although many organizations assume leaders will enhance their multicultural skills through international assignments, it is unclear how leaders translate these international experiences into knowledge and skills that enhance their effectiveness. Based on experiential learning theory (ELT), we propose that cultural intelligence (CQ) is an essential learning capability that leaders can use to translate their international experiences into effective experiential learning in culturally diverse contexts.

Over the past 2 decades CEO surveys have consistently identified a shortage of global leadership capability as a limiting factor in global expansion. At the same time, business schools have also come to recognize the need to develop global leadership in their graduates. The Global Leadership Expertise Development (GLED) model proposes a framework and process for developing global leadership competencies in a corporate setting. We describe how we applied this model in a higher education context, in the process transforming a more common approach to international business (IB) education into an experientially-intensive global leadership development program. Adopting elements of Kolb’ experiential learning theory (ELT) as well as concepts of instructional scaffolding and “red threads,” the program emphasizes personal development. Early analysis of the program’s impact points to substantial progress in developing global leader competencies in undergraduate business students.

In this chapter, we focus on expatriate CEOs who are assigned by the parent company to work in a subsidiary and compare them to those who themselves have initiated to work abroad as CEOs. Since we do not know much about these individuals, we direct our attention to: (1) who they are (demographics), (2) what they are like (personality), and (3) how they perform (job performance).

Data was sought from 93 assigned expatriate CEOs and 94 self-initiated expatriate CEOs in China.

Our findings demonstrate that in terms of demography, self-initiated CEOs were more experienced than assigned CEOs. With regard to personality, we found difference in self-control and dispositional anger: Assigned expatriate CEOs had more self-control and less angry temperament than their self-initiated counterparts. Finally, we found assigned expatriate CEOs to rate their job performance higher than self-initiated CEOs.

Although there may not always be immediate benefits, career consideration often plays a role when individuals choose whether to become an expatriate. For many years, organizations have used expatriation to develop talented managers for high-level positions in the home country. Recently, however, a new trend has emerged. Talented top managers are no longer expatriated only from within parent companies to subsidiaries. Self-initiated expatriates with no prior affiliation in the parent company are increasingly used to fill top management positions in subsidiaries.

This qualitative study explores the acquisition of global mindset in business executives who engaged in short-term business travel. Global mindset is operationalized as actively seeking to engage and reflect upon perspectives and orientations that both complement and contradict one’s own worldview. The narratives of 16 global supply chain leaders who work for a multinational company were content-analyzed. The results indicate that short-term business travel provides the context for participant reflection on their development as global leaders. They describe their development as a continuous evolution over time that is focused less on becoming a cultural expert and more on being culturally responsive in order to build relationships and achieve business results. The findings suggest that companies could take steps to leverage the developmental opportunity that short-term business travel represents.

This chapter will discuss the extent to which existing models on expatriate functions within the international business literature, still effectively capture the roles currently performed by expatriate managers. It analyse the Edstrom and Galbraith (1977) typology and present a conceptual framework on the roles currently performed by expatriate managers within MNCs. To do this, it will draw inspiration from the resource-based view (Barney, 1991; Peng, M. W. (2001). The resource-based view and international business. Journal of Management, 27, 803–829. Wernerfelt, 1984), and the organisation capability view (Grant, 1996). Following several propositions about managers’ key functions within MNCs, challenges of creating an all-encompassing framework on expatriate functions, and suggestions for future research and theoretical development will be identified.

This chapter will present a conceptual framework on expatriate functions.

Four decades since Edstrom and Galbraith’s seminal work, international developments have continued to impress upon the way MNCs organise and manage their worldwide activities. Yet, as the business environment progresses, theoretical models examining how international development impact the functions undertaken by expatriate managers within MNCs individuals are still relatively scarce. Hence, this chapter aims to contribute to the theoretical advancement in the area of expatriate functions by highlighting possible changes and expansion of expatriate managers within the current global business context.

In this contribution, we systematically review the extant global leadership literature to identify important bibliometric and thematic patterns in evidence in this evolving field of scholarship. Conceptualizing the phenomenon to include leaders/managers/supervisors who hold global, expatriate, or international positions, we draw out insights accumulated from a total of 327 published articles in key management and organizational behavior journals listed in Scopus. Our analysis proceeds in two sequential phases. Our bibliometric analysis first identifies the most cited articles, most published first authors, country bases of first authors, and frequently publishing journals in this field. This characterizes both the diversity and innovative nature of scholarship in the field. Our thematic content analysis, generated through Nvivo 11, isolates two dominant overarching themes that represent the wellspring for the body of literature, namely global leader development and global leader effectiveness. These themes of development and effectiveness are further explicated through six distinct lenses namely cultural, cognitive, learning, personality trait, social/relational, and political. These lenses are underpinned by a suite of theoretical perspectives encompassing individual, system, and contextual considerations. In combination, these sets of analyses bring added systematics to the field and serve as a point of departure for future inquiry.