"Die Fremde ist nicht Heimat geworden, aber die Heimat Fremde."(Alfred Polgar)- Überlegungen zum Jahr des interkulturellen Dialogs 2008

The present article tries to attract attention to the connection between the idea of the European Commision to create in 2008 a Year of the interculturaal dialogue and empiric studies in researching of being abroad. It will be one of the most important purposes in future to develop the studies in intercultural communications in the premise of consulting, coaching and mediation for foreign assignment or a deployment abroad. In this fields there's no doubt that there's a need for focussing new researches on the public and private life of employers abroad or on that what's called the working migration.

Great expectations

Purpose Organizational fairness has been shown to affect numerous employee outcomes, including organizational commitment and job satisfaction. The purpose of this paper is to explore whether an expatriate manager’s favorability toward accepting a foreign assignment affects the way they respond to subsequent treatment in the workplace, viewed in terms of organizational justice. Design/methodology/approach Data were gathered in two stages from 175 expatriate managers located in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). To test the authors’ predictions, the authors analyzed organizational commitment and job satisfaction as a function of organizational fairness (distributive and interpersonal) and pre-departure opinion. Findings The results suggest that expatriate managers who express a higher degree of favorability toward accepting a foreign assignment appear less reactive to changes in organizational fairness. Meanwhile, expatriate managers who express a lesser degree of favorability toward accepting the foreign assignment appear more sensitive to workplace fairness, such that when they feel treated unfairly, they demonstrate worse outcomes than those who were in favor of the assignment, and when they feel treated fairly, they demonstrate better outcomes than those who were in favor of the assignment. The net effect of pre-departure opinion appears to be an amplification of the relationship between subsequent fairness and outcomes. Practical implications Expatriate managers with a less favorable view of their assignment may harbor deep questions about whether they want to be in this new job capacity, and may therefore be more sensitive to how they are treated. Alternatively, people with a more favorable view of their assignment may have already decided they want to be in the new capacity, and so may be more robust to workplace treatment. Originality/value To the authors’ knowledge, this paper constitutes the first investigation of the effects of expatriate pre-departure opinion (i.e. favorability toward accepting a foreign assignment) on job satisfaction and commitment within the context of organizational justice. Furthermore, the UAE is a highly relevant context to study expatriate behavior.

Training U.S. Managers for Distant Shores

Proper pre-departure training and post-arrival mentoring of US managers who are assigned for distant and culturally and operationally different countries are vital for their success in their foreign assignment. Training them for foreign assignments is vital because they will be overwhelmed by an onslaught of diverse challenges of their tasks and unfamiliar operating and cultural situations, all of which will confound even the most capable domestic manager. Supervisory and decision making situations will be different from the home country situations with which they are so used to working before they left for the foreign shores. Specifically, they must cope and better manage their personally challenging issues, which are their own personal anxiety and stress arising out of unfamiliar situations that defy the cause-effect logic they were used to in their home countries, the foreign country’s unfamiliar environment causing perceived environmental uncertainty, their own personal flexibility and adaptation, communicating and leading with empathy in host country cultures, and self-efficacy and their own sustained drive for continuously working long hours to accomplish their own personal career goals and the foreign subsidiary’s objectives.

Social Contract Theory and Gender Discrimination: Some Reflections on the Donaldson/Dunfee Model

This paper relates Donaldson and Dunfee’s Integrative Social Contracts Theory to the problem of gender discrimination. We make the assumption that multinational managers might seek some guidance from ISCT to resolve ethical issues of gender discrimination in countries indifferent or hostile to gender equality. The role of Donaldson and Dunfee’s “hypernorms” seems especially crucial, and we find that, under their writings thus far, no “hypernorms” exist to make unethical the most blatant acts of sex discrimination in a host country whose local norms tolerate such discrimination. The genesis of “hypernorms” as “global moral minimums” is recounted, and specific application of ISCT to a familiar ethics case (“A Foreign Assignment”) is provided.