Bruce W. Stening

Coaching expatriate managers for success: Adding value beyond training and mentoring

This paper explores the potential of evidence-based executive coaching as an intervention for facilitating expatriate success. One-to-one professional coaching is proposed as a powerful supplement to two interventions that have traditionally been used to assist expatriate managers – training and mentoring. Coaching is likely to be effective with expatriate managers because, like the expatriate experience itself, it is a connected process that impacts interactively across the individual’s affective, behavioural and cognitive domains. Coaches can work with individuals to deal with their specific contexts, taking into account the complexity of the circumstances. It can also assist managers to take full advantage of training and mentoring programs. Evidence-based coaching informed by cross-cultural research and experience has the potential to improve work performance and the personal satisfaction of the expatriate manager. Its effectiveness would seem to be currently dependent, however, on the availability and deployment of suitably qualified and experienced coaches.

Expatriate management: lessons from the British in India

In this paper, lessons for the study of expatriate management are drawn from the period of British administration in India. It uses ‘the past to study the present’ and puts into sharp focus the key issues which confront human resource management researchers and practitioners dealing with expatriate management today. These issues are seen as essentially the same and cover such areas as selection, training, adjustment, appraisal, reward and re-entry.

Japanese managers in southeast asia: Amiable superstars or arrogant upstarts?

This study examines the stereotypes held by 664 expatriate and 624 local managers in the subsidiaries of 136 Japanese firms operating in Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. Using 18 semantic differential items, the opinions of the managers were sought concerning three matters: their own nationality (their autostereotype); the nationality with whom they worked (their heterostereotype); and how the nationality with whom they worked would see them (their metastereotype). Principal components analysis revealed three major factors underlying the stereotypes, which were labelled ‘managerial’, ‘entrepreneurial’ and ‘congenial’. These three factors are used to compare the various stereotypes of the groups.