will review one of the motives for international transfers – control and
coordination – in more detail. The final subsections will discuss the alter-
natives to expatriation, including the use of impatriation. Section 4 then
deals with the recruitment and selection issues associated with expatriation
and discusses both the prescriptive models found in the expatriate literature
and the situation that seems to persist in practice. Expatriate adjustment and
failure is then reviewed in some detail in Section 5, while in the final section
we will examine four different transfer archetypes based on the type of expatri-
ate allegiance.
2 STAFFING POLICIES
In Chapter 2 we discussed Perlmutter’s (1969) classic study that identified three
different international orientations: ethnocentric, polycentric and geocentric.
As we indicated in that chapter, these three orientations have become the stan-
dard way to describe MNC staffing policies. MNCs following an ethnocentric
staffing policy would appoint mostly parent country nationals (PCNs) to top
positions at their subsidiaries, while MNCs following a polycentric staffing
policy would prefer to appoint host country nationals (HCNs). Firms with a
geocentric staffing policy would simply appoint the best person, regardless of
his/her nationality and that could include third country nationals (TCNs),
nationals of a country other than the MNC’s home country and the country of
the subsidiary. In a later publication Heenan and Perlmutter (1979) defined a
fourth approach, which they called regiocentric. In this approach, managers are
moved on a regional basis, such as within Europe, and it often forms a mid-way
station between a pure polycentric/ethnocentric approach and a truly geo-
centric approach. It is important to note that these staffing policies apply to
key positions in MNC subsidiaries only. Although some PCNs or TCNs might
still be found at middle management, MNCs normally appoint host country
managers at this and lower levels.
The term expatriationis often used to describe the process of international
transfer of managers. Although the term expatriatecould literally be taken to
mean any employee that is working outside his or her home country, it is nor-
mally reserved for PCNs (and sometimes TCNs) working in foreign subsidiaries
of the MNC for a pre-defined period, usually 2–5 years. An alternative to expa-
triation is impatriation, where subsidiary managers are transferred to HQ. We
will discuss impatriation in Section 3. In this section, we will offer a more
detailed discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of using PCNs, HCNs
or TCNs as well as some recent statistics on the use of PCNs and HCNs in dif-
ferent countries and industries. We will also present a conceptual model that
summarises the factors influencing the choice between PCNs and HCNs.
252 International Human Resource Management