language and communication skills would be essential. These skills might be
less important for an expatriate who is sent out to transfer technical knowledge.
In this case, possession of specific technical skills would be most important. In
terms of appraisal and compensation, appraisal systems that are geared towards
the realisation of the specific objectives of the assignment would put the expa-
triate in a far better position to achieve his or her objectives.
Of bears, bumble-bees and spidersIn this section we’ll take a closer look at one of the motives for international
transfers: coordination and control, based on a study by Harzing (2001c). In
contrast to the study above, that directly asked managers for the motives for
international transfers, this study looked at expatriation in the context of con-
trol mechanisms in general. Data were analysed by correlating the level of
expatriate presence with the coordination mechanisms in question (direct
expatriate control, socialisation/shared values and informal communication).
The fact that there was a significantly positive relationship between expatriate
presence and these three coordination mechanisms, while no such relationship
was present for the other coordination mechanisms (e.g. bureaucratic control,
output control) included in this study, independently confirms the importance
of this function of expatriation.
As we have seen above, the coordination and control function of inter-
national transfers has three distinct elements. Expatriates are used to provide
personal/cultural control, in both a direct and an indirect way. They can serve
to replace or complement HQ centralisation of decision-making and direct sur-
veillance of subsidiaries by headquarters managers. This is the kind of control
that is alluded to in many of the German studies discussed above. We call this
the ‘bear’ role of expatriates. The bear is chosen as an analogy, because it reflects
a level of dominance (and threat that might be perceived in the extreme case)
associated with this type of expatriate control. Expatriates can also be used to
realise control based on socialisation and the creation of informal communica-
tion networks, which is the kind of control described by Edström and Galbraith
and some of the German studies. The role of expatriates in socialisation we refer
to as that of ‘bumble-bees’. Organisational bumble-bees fly ‘from plant to plant’
and create cross-pollination between the various off-shoots. Weaving an infor-
mal communication network is of course the role of expatriates as ‘spiders’.
While expatriates seem to perform their roles as bears in any situation, an
exploratory analysis showed that their role as bumble-bees and spiders is more
important in some situations than in others. It is more important in
subsidiaries that were established more than 50 years ago than in younger sub-
sidiaries, although the bumble-bee role is important in very young subsidiaries
as well. Both the bumble-bee and the spider role are particularly important in
subsidiaries that show a high level of local responsiveness, and that are not at
all or hardly dependent on headquarters for their sales and purchases. Finally,
Composing an International Staff 265