Asian Expatriate Development: A Comparative Study of Japanese, Korean and Singaporean Expatriates

• Main Authors: OSMAN-GANI, A. Ahad M., TAN, Wee Liang
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 1998
• Subjects: Singapore; Korea; Japan; expatriates; human resources development; Asian Studies; Human Resources Management; Strategic Management Policy
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/lkcsb_research/348; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/lkcsb_research/article/1347/viewcontent/auto_convert.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Owing to rapid internationalization of business activity, human resource development (HRD) has become increasingly important in recent years. This is especially true when domestic human resource management takes on international dimensions as it deals more with multicultural workforce. International HRD, much of it embodied in cross-cultural training, has been proposed by many scholars as a means of facilitating more effective interaction among managers, employees and customers from different national-cultural backgrounds. Despite the need for cross-cultural skills and the shortage of managers who possess these skills, most human resource decision-makers do nothing in terms of cross-cultural training for their employees. Studies have found that negotiations between business people of different cultures often fail because of problems related to cross-cultural differences, and the costs of failed cross-cultural encounters are very high. Cross-cultural training has long been advocated as a means of effective international business management. But, its use is not widespread in today’s business organizations. Various reasons have been cited for this, the most prevalent being that such training is not thought to be necessary and thus top management sees no need for it. However, the fundamental reason behind the lack of training seems to lie in wrong assumption that good management is good world-wide.