Study On Cross-cultural Adjustment And Cross-cultural Training For Chinese Expatriates

Foreign-oriented enterprises, as an emerging force in China’s economy, havebeen performing internationally and globally at a historically unprecedented rate inthe past ten years. It is a general trend to assign employees abroad which has laidgreat impacts on these foreign-oriented enterprises with employee assignments.Therefore, it is necessary that expatriates should adjust themselves to the culture ofhost countries as soon as possible and perform well in their jobs.Through previous studies, it can be concluded that a considerable number ofresearches from both home and abroad have been conducted on cross-culturaladjustment and cross-cultural training. Studies on cross-cultural adjustment abroaddated from the late1950s with various perspectives, while, in China, most of extantstudies have been conducted in a theoretical manner from psychological or culturalangle instead of an empirical approach. Moreover, as for researches on cross-culturaltraining, there is a lack of systematically theoretical framework, especially in terms ofthe correlation between cross-cultural adjustment and the contents and that betweencross-cultural adjustment and the methods of cross-cultural training.By making an inter-research on cross-cultural adjustment and cross-culturaltraining, this thesis is committed to figuring out the gap between the status quo ofcross-cultural adjustment and cross-cultural training of Chinese expatriates and thento exploring the relationship between them and finally to proposing constructivesuggestions. An integrated and tentative theoretical framework is established byapplying Colleen Ward’s Two Aspects of Adaptation and Grove and Torbion’sHomeostasis. Meanwhile, models by Bennett et al.(2000), Tung (1981) and Brislin etal.(1983) are referred as well in order to make this research more reliable.This research is conducted by adopting a combination of qualitative researchmethods and quantitative research methods. Data collection is mainly throughmodified questionnaire according to previous researches. Altogether,202pieces of questionnaires sent to those Chinese expatriates in foreign-oriented enterprises inGuangdong province are valid. Frequency, means, independent T-test, ANOVA andcorrelations by SPSS software are used in analyzing data for different purposes.The findings of this study are as follows. Firstly, it is found that Chineseexpatriates as a whole are not quite good at cross-cultural adjustment overall.Moreover, from the Two Aspects of Adaptation by Colleen Ward, they perform worseat adjusting to internal culture (deep culture) than adjusting to external culture(surface culture) with regards to sociocultural adjustment. As for psychologicaladjustment, patience to host nationals is a highlighted difficulty for expatriates’adjustment. Secondly, expatriates’ adjustment performance varies little according totheir age, gender as well as assigned positions. Nevertheless, there are significantdifferences among trained staff and non-trained staff in their cross-cultural adjustment.Despite such a situation of cross-cultural adjustment of Chinese expatriates, theexisting cross-cultural training provided is far beyond satisfaction. Most of thetrainings are not as helpful and useful as they seem to be. Thirdly, as for therelationship between cross-cultural adjustment and cross-cultural training, correlationanalysis shows that cross-cultural training is positively related with cross-culturaladjustment which in turn is also positively related with working performance.Cross-cultural adjustment is crucial in determining expatiates’ work performance,which is directly related to the rate of expatriate failure in international assignment.In conclusion, elevating expatriates’ cross-cultural adaptability so as to improvetheir performance in their assignments is a very urgent task. Given the reality thatChinese expatriates’ poor performance in cross-cultural adjustment and their actualneeds failing to be realized through cross-cultural training, it is advisable to designtailored cross-cultural training with various methods and contents which can improveexpatriates’ cross-cultural adaptability in order to decrease the rate of expatriatefailures and finally help achieve corporate goals.