The prediction of expatriate success is a hot topic among academic researchers and practitioners alike. Yet very few of the rigorous standards concerning selection that were developed within the domestic context have ever been applied to the expatriate situation. The field has become saturated with a myriad of prescriptive yet often ill-founded articles, which have had little if no impact on expatriate management practices.

Several academics have recently pointed out that, without a firm knowledge of what it is that should be predicted, any attempt to identify the determinants of expatriate success is futile. Despite five decades of research devoted to identifying these determinants, researchers have never reached a consensus about what it is that distinguishes the successful expatriates from the unsuccessful.
     
Some of the earliest research in this field focused on the prediction of expatriate failure, defined in terms of early returns to the home country. An early return is a poor proxy for expatriate success, however, since there may be reasons for early termination, such as the local economic climate in the host country, that are beyond the expatriate's control.

An additional problem with using early termination as a proxy for expatriate success is that under such a definition, a poorly performing expatriate, who somehow remains on the job, would be considered successful.  

On-assignment assessment of expatriate success

A second group of researchers, therefore, decided that a proper definition of expatriate success should include some sort of on-assignment assessment of their success, and defined expatriate success in terms of adjustment to - various facets of - living and working in the host country.
     
This definition of success was better than the 'early returns' definition, in that it looked more closely into the expatriates' situation within the host country. However, it was also problematic since adjustment to living and working in a foreign country is not the raison d'être for expatriate assignments.

That is, expatriates are not assigned to foreign countries to adjust as well as they can to the host country culture. Rather, expatriates are sent abroad to fill a position in which they are expected to perform. One could argue that an expatriate needs to adjust before he or she can function on the job, but recent research has indicated that the relationship between expatriate adjustment and expatriate performance is too low to maintain this position.

Expatriate success in terms of on the job performance

With the criterion of choice being performance, one needs to specify the performance standards that are to be predicted.

Ideally these performance standards are decided upon on the basis of a comprehensive job analysis. Job analysis refers to a technique where the job in question is broken down into the constituent behaviours that are required to perform it effectively.

And what is effective is ideally decided upon by having a panel of subject matter experts rate the importance of these constituent behaviours. By examining the degree to which these raters agree one can arrive at a relatively objective set of criteria with which performance may be evaluated.

Issues in delineating expatriate job performance behaviours

In practice the expatriate population is extremely heterogeneous, consisting of technical personnel, CEOs, and diplomats. This means that it may be nearly impossible to arrive at one set of performance behaviours that are important in each of these functions.

On the other hand, due to the small numbers of expatriates in each of these positions and the difficulties that researchers typically encounter in approaching them, it may be equally unfeasible to delineate criteria for each possible position an expatriate may fulfil abroad.

Researchers in domestic personnel psychology faced a similar paradox, and they dealt with it by allocating performance behaviours to a number of dimensions that were assumed to be important in each and every job.
          
Having such a classification is useful in that it sets the stage for so-called validity generalisation, where research findings concerning the prediction of job performance in one job domain, are generalised to others.

Although the generalisation of these classifications to the expatriate context is a useful starting point, it is unlikely to lead to a complete picture of all of the performance behaviours that expatriates engage in. This is because expatriates frequently need to bridge cultural divides to reach desired business objectives.

Therefore, in addition to the generalisation of performance classifications from the domestic context, an expatriate specific performance (sub)-domain would need to be represented by such behaviours as "Making sure your Asian negotiation partner does not lose face".

In part II of this two-part series, stefan Mol looks at recent developments on the predictor side of the equation.

Dr. Stefan Mol is assistant professor in Organizational Behaviour at the Amsterdam Business School of the University of Amsterdam. He was previously affiliated with the same university as a student and received his Master's degree in psychology upon the completion of a thesis validating the Multicultural Personality Questionnaire (MPQ) among both expatriate and international student populations while living in Taiwan. Upon returning to the Netherlands he worked as a research consultant with GITP International BV, but returned to academia in 2002 when he started his PhD in psychology at the Institute of Psychology of the Erasmus University Rotterdam. Stefan obtained his PhD in December 2007. His dissertation consists of four studies investigating expatriate selection practices and one study aimed at assessing the performance of police trainees in South-Africa. His research collaborations have appeared (or will appear) in the European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology (in press), the International Journal of Knowledge and Learning (in press), Human Performance (2009), the International Journal of Selection and Assessment (2009), the International Journal of Intercultural Relations (2005), the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology (2005), and the Asian Journal of Social Psychology (2003). In addition he has co-authored several book chapters.