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Expatriate Management:
Comparison of MNCs Across Four Parent
Countries
Richard B. Peterson ! Nancy K. Napier ! Won Shul-Shim
Executive Summary
This article reports the results of a study of expatriate management and headquar-
ters–subsidiary relations in 29 American, British, German, and Japanese multina-
tionals and a sample of 46 of their foreign subsidiaries based on face-to-face and
telephone interviews with key international HR, subsidiary HR, and subsidiary
managing directors. We found that earlier studies, heavily weighted with U.S. multi-
nationals, cannot necessarily be applied to expatriate management experiences of
other national industrial countries. Also, expatriate management is more similar for
American and British MNCs, while both German and Japanese multinationals in
our sample had fairly distinct systems of using expatriates in their foreign subsidiaries.
Thus, we can discuss at least three fairly distinct models of expatriate management
and corporate-foreign-subsidiary control. ˙© 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
n emerging literature focuses on the area of expatriate management and the rela-
tionship between multinational corporations (MNCs) and their international
subsidiaries and joint ventures (Dowling, Schuler, & Welch, 1994). As compa-
nies continue to expand beyond their headquarters’ country, these issues have
growing importance to management and government leaders.
We define expatriate management as those issues relating to the use of parent-
country nationals (PCNs) and third-country nationals (TCNs) in foreign sub-
Richard B. Peterson is Professor of management at the University of Washington Business
School. Nancy K. Napier is Professor in the College of Business Administration and Economics
at Boise State University. Won Shol-Shim is Associate Professor at Hanyang University in South
Korea.
Thunderbird International Business Review, Vol. 42(2) 145–166 • March–April 2000
© 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
This first author wishes to express his appreciation to the University of Washington-CIBER Program, operated with
funding from the U.S. Office of Education, for our ability to interview the corporate and foreign subsidiary officials. The
views expressed are those of the authors, not the U.S. Office of Education.
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