Research On Networking Of Expatriates In Multinational Enterprises And The Impact On Expatriate Adaptation

With the deepening of economic globalization, there are more and more MNCs searching for optimal resource allocation worldwide. As a result, more and more expatriates are assigned abroad to expand overseas market and coordinate the flow of resources and information between the parent and subsidiary corporations. While external assignments are not trouble-free journeys, expatriates may encounter all kinds of difficulties, even faced with the failure. The related cost has caused a heavy burden for MNCs. This paper made a careful literature review about the failure of expatriates, and found out that the inadaptation of expatriates in host countries is a key factor. Meanwhile, the largest factor resulting in inadaptation lays on the disability of self-adjusting or obtaining help from the existing organizational and private support network. Since changes happened in cultural environment, the existing social network with domestic relatives, friends and colleagues may be weakened, even break off naturally. As an important economic entity in the world, China is playing a significant role during the process of economic globalization, and there is an increasing number of Chinese expatriates assigned abroad to seek further development. In the meantime,"Guan Xi" culture always features Chinese culture, and Chinese expatriates put great emphasis on the building and maintaining of social network. Therefore, it’s quite necessary for expatriates to re-construct the local social network and from which to gain support on a basis of self-adjustment to make external assignments successful and better adapt to the local environment. On account of that, this thesis takes expatriates in MNCs as research objects, searching for their local networking in host countries and the impact on their own adaptation.After a detailed literature arrangement, this thesis has formed a general progcess model of social networking which is applied to the research design on expatriates, and formed a frame of understanding. Since expatiates are quite unique, this thesis mainly adopts semi-structured interview method and open-ended questionnaire method, trying to modify and extract some crucial behavior categories in the process of networking, and making the influence mechanism of expatriates social networking on adaptation clear with a modified conceptual model.The findings are:(1) adaptation difficulties are unavoidable, but different expatriates have encountered various adaptive situations;(2) it’s quite necessary of local social networking in host country, and during the process, expatriates mainly adopts6kinds of crucial behavior categories:identifying and selective behavior, maintaining contact behavior, social behavior, increasing visibility behavior, kindness exchange behavior, information exchange behavior;(3) the results of social networking are diverse, which can be divided into6dimensions:social network size, social network heterogeneity, social network strength, social network density, social network resource and internal and external balance of social network;(4) social networking has effects on expatriate adaptation, while the degree and scope of effect diversify.Finally, according to the research findings, this thesis proposes corresponding suggestions from the view of expatriates and MNCs, and hopes they can improve the adaptive state of expatriates, reduce the failure of external assignments, and offer help to expatriates management scientifically for MNCs.