Research On Expatriate Turnover Of China International Contractors

With the implementation of going-global strategy of Chinese enterprises, an increasing number of engineering enterprises contract overseas projects in a broader scope of business with expanding market presence. The data released by the Ministry of Commerce revealed that the revenue of project scontracted overseas surged from8.9billion USD in2001to103.4s USD in2011, indicating the rapid development of China international contactors. COVEC is a fully-owned subsidiary of CREC, mainly focusing on contracting overseas projects. The issue of expatriate employee turnover has become increasingly alarming in recent years in the course of overseas business expansion. The high turnover rate of expatriates is a huge loss to COVEC human resource and has an adverse impact on the core corporate competency. Based on this consideration, this dissertation references some classical theories on expatriate management and employee turnover, probes the causes for COVEC expatriate turnover, and indicates the main factors affecting the turnover from the perspective of employee, enterprise and society. The dissertation also proposes six measures to resolve the issue, i.e., establish regional business departments to build up broader career development paths, accelerate employee localization process, enhance the repatriation management, attend to the culture building of overseas posts to enhance employees’ sense of belonging, improve their compensation and welfare, and develop logistic safeguards. All these recommendations are expected to provide COVEC and other Chinese international contractors with meaningful reference to manage expatriates and reduce their turnover rate.