What is it about?
This study investigate when having more autonomy in decision making influences cross-cultural adjustment of expatriate managers (company sponsored employees sent on international assignments). We consider this relationship to be positive, in general, but is affected by additional contingencies/boundary conditions. We consider the extent to which expatriate managers feel the pressure to globally integrate their operations into parent company strategy (global integration pressure) as a first boundary condition/moderator as well as the length of time that the parent company had been operating the particular foreign subsidiary where expatriate manager is currently assigned (foreign subsidiary operation experience) as an additional boundary condition/moderator. We find that the positive relationship between decision autonomy and (work and interaction aspects of) cross-cultural adjustment to be generally higher and flat under high global integration pressure (i.e., feeling high pressure to globally integrate their operations into parent company strategy led to higher levels of cross-cultural adjustment regardless of the autonomy in decision making expatriate managers possessed). However, this was further influenced by the amount (more specifically, length) of foreign subsidiary operation experience such that when parent company had been operating a particular foreign subsidiary for a long time (high foreign subsidiary operation experience), having high decision autonomy was helpful in enhancing (work and general aspects of) cross-cultural adjustment under high global integration pressure (i.e., there is a three-way interaction effects among decision autonomy, global integration pressure, and foreign subsidiary operation experience on cross-cultural adjustment).
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Why is it important?
This study is important in establishing that providing decision autonomy (discretion to decide what to do at the foreign subsidiary) for expatriate managers does not always lead to higher cross-cultural adjustment levels, which arguably is a necessary condition for the expatriate managers to perform effectively/successfully at their international assignment locations.
Perspectives
This was my third Academy of Management Journal publication overall and a second one where I am the leading author on. This is why I really wanted to publish this paper at this journal. As such, I made changes to the manuscript that I didn't necessarily think is good in terms of its impact because I wanted this paper to be a meso-paper (integrating macro/strategy with micro/organizational behavior) literature. We continue to believe that global integration pressure captures the global strategy of the parent company, even though we couldn't perform statistically appropriate analysis (since we only have 9 U.S.-based multinational hotel chains).
Riki Takeuchi
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
This was my third Academy of Management Journal publication overall and a second one where I am the leading author on. This is why I really wanted to publish this paper at this journal. As such, I made changes to the manuscript that I didn't necessarily think is good in terms of its impact because I wanted this paper to be a meso-paper (integrating macro/strategy with micro/organizational behavior) literature. We continue to believe that global integration pressure captures the global strategy of the parent company, even though we couldn't perform statistically appropriate analysis (since we only have 9 U.S.-based multinational hotel chains).
Professor Riki Takeuchi
University of Texas at Dallas
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: When Does Decision Autonomy Increase Expatriate Managers' Adjustment? An Empirical Test, Academy of Management Journal, February 2008, The Academy of Management,
DOI: 10.5465/amj.2008.30696751.
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