Page 421 - Cultures and Organizations

386 IMPLICATIONS

Culture shock problems of accompanying spouses, more often than those
of the expatriated employees themselves, seem to be the reason for early
return. The expatriate, after all, has the work environment that offers a
cultural continuity with home. There is the story of an American wife,
assigned with her husband to Nice, France, a tourist’s heaven, who locked
herself up inside their apartment and never dared to go out.
Articles in the management literature often cite high premature return
rates for expatriates. Dutch-Australian researcher Anne-Wil Harzing crit-
ically reviewed more than thirty articles on the subject and found state-
ments such as this: “Empirical studies over a considerable period suggest

that expatriate failure is a significant and persistent problem with rates
ranging between 25 and 40 percent in the developed countries and as
high as 70 percent in the case of developing countries.” Trying to check

the sources of these figures, Harzing discovered very little evidence.
The only reliable multicountry, multinationality study was by Professor
Rosalie Tung, from Canada, who had shown that in the late 1970s, before
intercultural training became really common, mean levels of premature
recall of expatriates for Japanese and European companies were under 10
percent; for U.S. companies the mean was somewhere in the lower teens,
with exceptional companies reporting recall rates at the 20 to 40 percent
level. And this situation probably improved in the years afterward, if we
assume that human resources managers worked on solving their problems.
The message of dramatically high expatriate failure rates sounds good to
intercultural consultants trying to sell expatriate training and to convince
5
themselves and others of the importance of their work, but it is a myth. A
better sales argument for the trainers is that premature return may be low
but that it doesn’t really measure the problem of expatriation: the damage
caused by an incompetent or insensitive expatriate who stays is much more
signifi cant.
Among refugees and migrants there is a percentage who fall seriously
physically or mentally ill, commit suicide, or remain so homesick that they
return, especially within the fi rst year.
Expatriates and migrants who successfully complete their accultura-
tion process and then return home will experience a reverse culture shock
in readjusting to their old cultural environment. Migrants who have
returned home sometimes find that they do not fi t anymore and emigrate

again, this time for good. Expatriates who successively move to new for-
eign environments report that the culture shock process starts all over