Failed international assignments can be extremely costly to an organization. Companies should place great emphasis on the importance of selecting appropriate staff members for international assignments. A consistent and detailed assessment of an expatriate employee’s performance, as well as appraisal of the operation as a whole, is critical to the success of an international assignment. Issues such as the criteria and timing of performance reviews, raises, and bonuses should be discussed and agreed on before the employees are selected and placed on international assignments.

Although appraising the performance of an expatriate employee is just as important as appraising the performance of employees hired for domestic assignments, each international assignment is different and unique unto itself. A general rule in appraising expatriate employees is that each international office should use a different appraisal system. Employers should not take a performance appraisal system that was designed for appraising domestic employees and try to modify it for use with expatriate employees because many variables (e.g., environment, task criteria, and personality factors) need to be understood and taken into consideration when assessing an expatriate employee’s performance.

Before an expatriate employee departs from the home-base country, the HR Department should work with the managers responsible for expatriate employees to develop a critical professional profile for each employee who is placed on an international assignment. This profile should clearly outline what the company’s expectations and productivity standards are in areas such as profitability and operation efficiency.

Although establishing performance criteria is a difficult task because of the many differences in international environments, equitable productivity standards that are applicable to manufacturing and service industries will need to be determined within each foreign subsidiary. Performance criteria and goals are best established by combining the values and norms of each local environment with the home-office’s performance standards. An individual country profile should be developed and should take into account the foreign subsidiary’s environment. This profile should be used to review any factors that may have an effect on the expatriate employee’s performance. Such factors include language, culture, politics, labor relations, economy, government, control, and communication.

Once any underlying factors that may affect an expatriate employee’s performance have been determined, the information should be used to group together the organization’s multinational subsidiaries into country clusters on the basis of similarities among each country’s environmental factors. Critical professional profiles for each expatriate employee should be compared against others within that country cluster to ensure that proper performance measurement criteria are, in fact, being used when appraising individual employees who have been placed on international assignments.

Additional information about managing expatriate performance, as well as other issues involved in international assignments, is available through an organization called the Integrated Resources Group (IRG). This organization has compiled a report titled Expatriate Adjustment and Performance (Scott, 1997) that details the anonymous views of 81 experienced American expatriate business managers and executives. The presentations in this report provide unique access to the perceptions of business managers and executives who have served with distinction in expatriate assignments. For additional information on this study, as well as the many other services that IRG provides, visit the web site at www.expat-repat.com, or call (915) 676-2290.

Please Note: This material is provided as general information and is not a substitute for legal or other professional advice. Contact the Knowledge Center for more information.

Express Request

SHRM’s Express Request (ER) service allows members to request and receive resources on over 100 timely HR topics via e-mail. Available Express Requests are listed on the web site, and responses are sent immediately.