Barriers Expatriates Encounter During Cross-Cultural Interactions

Wen-Hsiang Lai () and Ching-Wen Yang ()
Additional contact information
Wen-Hsiang Lai: Department of Business Administration, Feng Chia University, Taiwan
Ching-Wen Yang: #x2020;Ph.D. Program of Business, Feng Chia University, Taiwan

Journal of Enterprising Culture (JEC), 2017, vol. 25, issue 03, 239-261

Abstract: In the era of globalization, cross-cultural issues have been widely discussed. However, research concerning cultural barriers expatriates face in foreign subsidiaries are relatively rare. Hence, the aim of this study is to investigate and prioritize barriers that expatriates encounter during cross-cultural interactions. This study integrates a review of the literatures and experts’ experiences to construct an analytic hierarchy process (AHP) model. AHP questionnaires were distributed to multinational corporations (MNCs) and were analyzed using Expert Choice software. This study finds that national culture bonded barriers are the most critical factors that hinder expatriates’ cross-cultural interactions with the host country. In addition, the sub-factors of ethnocentrism, headquarter strategy and cross-cultural communication are the most important factors within the categories of national culture bonded barriers, organizational barriers and individual rooted barriers, respectively. Finally, this study concludes that because cultural barriers are the main factors causing the failures of expatriates, it is crucial for MNCs to provide their employees with cross-cultural trainings that prepare expatriates’ language and cultural abilities for cross-cultural interactions with the host country and non-work social networks to facilitate the cross-cultural adjustment in MNCs.

Keywords: Cross-cultural interaction; cultural barrier; expatriate (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0218495817500091
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wsi:jecxxx:v:25:y:2017:i:03:n:s0218495817500091

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from

DOI: 10.1142/S0218495817500091

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Enterprising Culture (JEC) is currently edited by Teck-Meng Tan

More articles in Journal of Enterprising Culture (JEC) from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tai Tone Lim ().