Inadequate Training is a Major Reason that Leads to Expatriates

Proceedings of The Association for Business Communication 7th Asia-Pacific Conference, March 27-31 2007

Copyright 2007, Association for Business Communication

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Inadequate Training is a Major Reason that Leads to Expatriates’

Inadequate Cross-cultural Business Communication Competence—A

Case Study with a China-based Company

Xiaofei Xu, City University of Hong Kong, [email protected]

ABSTRACT

With growth of Chinese economy, more and more Chinese enterprises are competing in an

international environment and sending expatriates to various countries in the world.

As China-based companies in the process of globalization present salient differences with foreign

companies from an advanced economy, expatriate communication management becomes a big

issue.

Taking a big hi-tech enterprise in mainland China as a case, this presentation analyzes the

company’s Chinese expatriate management and its efforts in improving the global organizational

communication efficacy. It also explores how similar China-based enterprises, which now stand at

an initial stage of globalization, optimize their organizational communication systems to secure

their global competitive advantages. How Chinese expatriate competency interacts with

headquarter communication competency is also discussed in this presentation.

INTROUDCTION

While an extensive literature examines how Western expatriates adapt to their overseas

assignments (Adler, 1997; Du-Babcock, 2000), increasingly Chinese enterprises are sending their

expatriates outside of China to take part in the international business arena as a result of the high

growth rate of China’s economy. To bridge the gap between the Western literature and Chinese

practice in this line of research, some Chinese scholars（陳曉萍，2005；王志樂，2004） have

investigated how Chinese corporations compete globally. Their studies depict a whole range of

targeted companies, yet little concern has been given to the communication issue of Chinese-

speaking expatriates (CSEs) in the global business community.

CSEs today present salient discrepancies with expatriates from advanced economies in terms of

population, positions, stratification, company status and degrees of decentralization. Taking into

consideration of their importance to their companies, studies investigating CSEs from fast-

growing Chinese corporations with global operation from micro perspectives are needed.



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LITERATURE REVIEW

With increasing globalization, the research literature on expatriate communication from a cross-

cultural perspective has flourished in the past few years (Adler, 1997; Hall, 1977; Hofstede, 1991),

focusing mainly on cultural dimensions, cross-cultural misinterpretations, expatriate employee

entry and reentry, global careers, relations between business structures and intercultural business

communication.

Du-Babcock and Babcock (1996, 2001) proposed language-based communication zone models

suggesting that suitable strategies should be selected to fit certain zones. They also presented

empirically derived models of expatriate-local staff oral communication patterns. Du-Babcock

(2000) developed a model from a communication perspective that centers around an on-the-job

adaptation of Western expatriates over three identifiable stages, namely, system identification,

system development and system refinement. She suggested that the completion of a much longer

adjustment of at least two years is required for an expatriate to become fully productive and also

commented on specific training for expatriates.

Adler (1997) suggested that an expatriate global career cycle experiences such factors as home

country assignment, recruitment, selection, orientation, global assignment, debriefing, reentry, and

return. She also argued that cross-cultural adjustment to a new country consists of adjusting to the

job, interacting with the locals, and adapting to the general environment, psychologically

following a U-shaped curve. She further proposed that cross-cultural communication continually

involves misunderstanding caused by misperception, misinterpretation, and misevaluation.

Teagarden and Gordon (1995) highlighted relational skills, which include but are not limited to

communicative ability in the mother tongue and language mastery, as effective ingredients for

expatriate success.

Varner and Beamer (2005) provided an overall framework on international business

communication with aspects such as cultural strategy, business strategy, and corporate strategy.

Their framework has laid a good foundation for a detailed investigation into how expatriates adopt

specific strategies to secure success within internal and external business communication contexts,

both in verbal and non-verbal communication activities. In their model, availability of technology

is regarded as one of the variables within the corporate strategy circle. This element has

underrated information technology’s significant impact on people’s communication competency

in the global environment.

Instead of verifying a certain theory or model, with fresh and real cases this paper analyzes

communication issues that a big China-based company--XYZ Company–experienced, and

explores why inadequate training leads to expatriates’ inadequate cross-cultural business

communication competence. While theory and practice in cross-cultural communication in the

Western world has gone far, China is just entering this field as a “student.” Contributing first-hand

cases to the field may bring about more in-depth discussion on the issue of expatriate

communication.



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CASE DESCRIPTION

Profile of XYZ Company and its expatriates With headquarters in mainland China, XYZ started its international business in the middle of

1990s. Now XYZ has overseas offices across over 100 countries with around 4000 employees

working in the international front line market. The percentage of local staff in overseas offices of

XYZ in average has been up to 60%.

Expatriates in this research are defined as sharing the following characteristics:

1. They are of Chinese nationality, with Chinese language as their mother tongue;

2. They are recruited in People’s Republic of China to work in areas outside of

Mainland China;

3. They are working for at least 3 months in overseas offices.

Among all the expatriates, 7% are managers (regional chiefs and country managers), 36% are pre-

sales staff, and 57% are post-sales staff. The heavy percentage of staff in after-sales shows the

company is outputting their own technology to other countries with major technical support tasks.

With such a big number of expatriates working around the world, two major communication

issues have challenged XYZ for quite some time.

Cases in cross-cultural business communication in headquarters and branches overseas

Both headquarters and overseas branches complain of difficulties in communication.

Case I Some overseas branches complained that headquarters

issued documents in Chinese which resulted in a heavy

load of translation.

Case II International Marketing Divisions experienced heavy

restructuring in 2005, which led to many problems in

communication and even caused confusion. Expatriates

could not find the right person to handle issues.

Case III Some local staff received little notification of training in

China, although calls for enrolment were issued a month

earlier. They were not able to prepare enough money to

come to China and had to borrow money from their

Chinese colleagues after arrival, which astonished the

training organization department.



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Case IV A mid-autumn good wish in Chinese was sent to many

international customers from headquarters in 2006.

Immediately, customers in South American regions shot

serious complaints to the local office. They complained

XYZ did not respect customers and brought disturbance

to their work.

Cross-cultural conflicts in overseas offices

Case V Segregation between Chinese-speaking expatriates and

local staff prevails in many overseas branches. Chinese-

speaking expatriates and local staff were arranged to sit

separately in different areas of the office. Expatriates just

keep necessary work contacts with local staff and seldom

mix with the local culture. Chinese language is still

dominant in the local working environment and local staff

often felt separated from Chinese groups.

Case VI All the overseas HR managers raised the overtime work

issue as the most difficult one in staff management.

Chinese staff are used to working overtime for free, but

local staff often refuse to work after office hours. They do

not understand why Chinese expatriates spend all the time

on work rather than lead a balanced life. If the local staff

are asked to work overtime, they request compensation in

the form of extra payment or vacation, which gives HR a

dilemma.

Case VII It is difficult to transfer management communication style

from one culture to another. Once a manager who

performed well in Africa was moved to a country

in the Eastern Europe region. Soon a local senior staff

member resigned because he could not bear the new

manager’s strong and dictatorial style.

ANALYSIS OF CASES

Case I and Case IV show that global communication awareness is absent in the management

culture in headquarters. XYZ has not developed a global language as an international

communication medium. Working in a China-based company, most employees in headquarters do



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not have overseas living or working experience. If they need to contact an overseas office, they are

used to looking for expatriates to avoid using English. When sending documents to overseas

offices, they take it for granted that translation should and would be done locally, because it is the

local office, not the headquarters, that needs to make local staff understand what is in the

documents. They suppose customers in other countries share practices common in China, and tend

to apply their experience in China to other countries. Although functioning as the brain to

coordinate and support global operations of the company, headquarters fail to foster effective

international communication awareness among employees. Had headquarters employees

functioning as an interface with overseas offices taken training courses in customer service skills,

team spirit, cross-cultural business communication, and company overseas organization in

advance, they would have a better understanding of and more respect to their overseas colleagues’

working environment and communication difficulties, and the situation in Cases I and IV would

not have happened.

Case II displays that an effective system for international communication within the organization

has not been set up in headquarters. Case III shows an internal communication network is not

effective to guarantee a smooth information flow. A bottleneck exists between headquarters and

local offices to block the smooth transfer of information, especially maintenance information, such

as company policies and business processes. A most frequent complaint is that overseas offices do

not know to whom they should turn at headquarters when they try to go through different stages of

a business process. Since local staff have little access to company information (including training

notification) due to language barriers, expatriates are the only link between China and local

offices. After working abroad for a long time, expatriates lose their previous network advantage,

due to personnel or organizational changes. Whenever headquarters experience re-structuring,

expatriates have to adapt to “new headquarters” and have to explain the changes to local staff

while they themselves may also have problems in understanding what has happened. Furthermore,

although maintenance information is sent to overseas offices, the updates do not necessarily arrive

in time. Neither expatriates nor local staff can obtain direct and detailed interpretation. They

follow the process with uncertainty, and therefore they often suffer a lot from getting lost in a

process or time-consuming repetition of the same information to different people in headquarters

while moving around within a process. Furthermore, many offices in developing countries are

often denied access to the Internet or intranet due to the limitation of local telecom infrastructure.

It is even harder to keep such a group updated of the changes in the company.

The headquarters fail to provide a system to facilitate the communication between local staff and

employees in China. In the internal emailing system, one can identify a Chinese staff person by

putting in his Chinese name plus an “enter”. But local staff who do not know the Chinese

language have to memorize a Chinese employee’s last 6 digits of his employment number if they

want to send him an email! Similar situations also apply to other electronic operation platforms.

Even for the online management system, the English version is not a complete alternative to the

original Chinese one. Local staff heavily rely on expatriates for information from headquarters.

Case IV illustrates a lack of global communication awareness and strict communication procedure

in headquarters. Cases V, VI and VII call urgently for needed expatriates’ cultural adaptation



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training due to the problems in the office regarding the communication environment, culture and

skills.

XYZ’s COPING STRATEGIES

Facing these problems, XYZ Company adopted a series of actions to improve the situation. The

information and channels for internal communication management are strengthened. For example,

the corporate university of XYZ started a new service in 2006 to search for technical materials for

overseas staff. If overseas staff need material in a certain product category, all they need to do is to

send their request by email. The person in charge collects all the resources and makes sure the

requesting party receives the documents he or she requested. In 2006, the headquarters stipulated

that bilingual versions are required for all documents that need to be issued to overseas branches.

In 2005, the company launched an English competency certification program to encourage

employees to learn English.

Organizational communication network is also being optimized. Restructuring, minor or major,

takes place from time to time. In 2005, the overseas regional platform was re-structured to

enhance communication as well as resource-support and decision-making efficiency. The changes

involved several thousand employees. To minimize negative impacts on local offices, a special

team was set up to give training on the new organizational structure to overseas offices on a

circuit. While restructuring of the organization is not intended just to promote internal

communication, the internal communication speed is being improved. Regarding communication

hardware, XYZ developed a fast, safe, convenient, and cost-effective internal instant messenger

system and promoted use of such a system across the whole company. At present, employees in

both China and local offices are used to talking and exchange information through the platform.

What’s more, to make overseas employees informed of company developments in time, an

English version of the internal newsletter is issued and mailed every month to local offices.

Management of expatriates, a major cross-cultural business communication constituency, is

improved. Before 2004, selection and training of expatriates were organized at the company level.

New employees were recruited for overseas assignments after a short period of training. Those

expatriates had to spend a lot of time learning how to contact headquarters for support, which

lowered communication efficiency. Since the end of 2004, XYZ has upgraded expatriate manager

selection and training to the company level. The company launched Double Best Action in 2004,

Deputy Regional Chief Training Program in 2005 and International Manager Camp in 2006 and

put qualifications for expatriate managers. For all expatriates, at least one year’s experience with

the company is a must. The period of overseas assignment is at least 2-3 years. A minimum of

three year’ overseas working experience is required as a pre-requisite for promotion at

headquarters.

Another action is to recruit foreign employees to work at headquarters in order to change the

communication culture of headquarters through diversification of staff. By the end of 2006, about

100 foreigners have been working in China, in areas such as technical documents preparation,

training, human resource, finance, quality management, and customer service. Differences in



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perspectives and values between Chinese staff and foreign staff lead to making headquarters

personnel more active in learning international practice.

ANALYSIS OF EXPATRIATE TRAINING IN XYZ

While XYZ Company is trying to solve the problems in cross-cultural business communication,

they have underestimated the role of training to enhance expatriates’ cross-cultural business

communication competence.

XYZ has stated in its strategic plan that the international market outside China market should

generate 80% of the revenue when XYZ is fully globalized. To hit such a target, the company

needs a large number of well-trained employees with cross-cultural communication competence.

Training plays a key role in this process. However, the organization is in lack of systematic

training program for expatriates.

First of all, no specialized course on cross-cultural communication has been set as required for

both expatriates and headquarters to improve communication awareness and competence. Up until

now, only expatriate managers’ training is organized at the company level, which takes up only

7% of the whole expatriate population, which means a majority of the expatriates is not trained to

work in cross-cultural settings. A prevailing perception in the company is that frequent

international business trips will enable expatriates to acquire cross-cultural communication

competence, and another one is that employees working in headquarters do not need cross-cultural

communication training. Neither perception is supported by fact. Once during a training program

for international pre-sales staff in a division of XYZ in Shanghai, a senior engineer who had

traveled to over 20 countries described foreign staff in another country as “dirty and lazy”. With

strong ethnocentrism, expatriates will never mix with local staff.

Even for expatriate managers, effective cross-cultural business communication training is missing.

In the schedule of an international manager camp in 2006, only one 8-hour unit of sharing on

cross-cultural adaptation by a repatriate manager was arranged, and it was rated lowest in training

evaluation. Actually, cross-cultural business communication competence acquisition proves to be

a continuous and long term process. For example, Colgate-Palmolive Company has been quoted

as a case in MBA textbooks on providing cross-cultural training in different modes across a few

months for its expatriates before their overseas assignment. In XYZ, following the traditional

Chinese education method, the training designer has compacted and forced different bites of

business skills relating to expatriate manager’s work into the schedule. However, expatriates’

primary concern is to build effective communication for survival in a new country. Without good

cross-cultural communication skills, it is impossible for an individual expatriate manager to fulfill

his or her function and lead a diversified team. Many trainees mentioned in the above case slept in

many classes but they spared no efforts in language learning. As the courses were designed based

on job analysis, it can be inferred that management in headquarters have not fully realized

communication’s important role in an expatriate manager’s working environment.

To facilitate expatriates’ communication, training can be employed as a useful tool to enhance

internal communication. Within XYZ, training is more than a process to equip employees with

proper attitude, knowledge and skills. A more important function of XYZ training is to serve as a



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platform to unify employees’ minds in understanding company strategies and practices. XYZ has

been running middle manager’s training program since 2001. Every year, all the managers must

gather together to receive off-the-job management training, and there is no exception to

international managers. In 2006, to avoid disturbance to international business, international

managers received the training in their own regions/countries. The satisfaction degree fell

drastically. All the expatriate managers complained that such an arrangement deprived them of

good opportunities to network with managers in R & D departments and other functional units in

headquarters. They regard training in China as an informal but informative and engaging activity.

They can discuss many issues with their colleagues in the class. For them, the training class

functions as a channel for upward and parallel communication within the organization in addition

to help them acquire and update management skills.

Inadequate training for expatriates also reflects an emphasis on English but not on cross-cultural

business communication competence. According to the data from the English certification

program, by the end of 2006, only 50% of expatriate managers reach level 5 out of the 6-level

system. It is interesting that despite low foreign language skills, all the overseas offices are

performing. For example, a manager who was transferred from China to Spain did not speak any

foreign languages, but made a breakthrough in the market in the first year of his term. It is his

communication competence, not English ability that enables the manager to win. What’s more

interesting is that he managed to persuade local customers to learn Chinese.

To explore the relations between English ability and performance, a pilot study was designed to

investigate two questions. The first question attempted to find out if English communication

competency is important to undertaking overseas assignments; the second question explored

whether there was a positive correlation between expatriates’ English communication ability and

their overseas performance.

The subject in the pilot study consists of 37 international managers newly selected for overseas

assignments in August 2006. Their average oral English conversation ability was 2.5 out of the 6-

level system, which is far from the common overseas survival requirement.

A survey of Chinese-speaking expatriates’ English Communication Competency in Business was

conducted twice. One study was done before these Chinese expatriates were sent overseas, and the

other was done in the third month after they had settled down in their host countries. According to

this survey, the degree of agreement on the influence of English on their communication

competency was 5.1 and 5.2 on a 7-point Likert Scale respectively; both being larger than the

mean value 4. These findings show that English (language) is generally regarded as very

important to the communication competency of Chinese expatriates.

The sales management department in headquarters was responsible for keeping track of this group

of Chinese expatriates for 6 months. The expatriates and their managers, regional chiefs, were

required to give an evaluation of their overseas adjustment and performance each month. In

September 2006, that is, one month after they were sent outside of China, feedback was provided

for 26 out of 37 expatriates, among whom 16 people (61.5%) mentioned they needed to improve

their English. In addition, 29 regional chiefs commented on their subordinates, 14 of whom



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(48.3%) expressed a wish that the new Chinese expatriates could improve their English. In

December 2006, the percentage decreased to 41.4% and 25% respectively. It seemed that for the

first one or two months, English communication ability plays a significant role in their overseas

adjustment. When they become more familiar with the local culture, their English languages

fluency improves and therefore less urgency exists for them to communicate better in English.

The internal source shows that among this group of managers, 6 out of 37 were rated as

“Excellent” in September 2006, and 4 out of the 6 (67%) were working in post-sales positions. In

December 2006, 13 people were rated as “Excellent” with 8 of them (62%) working in the post-

sales section. It should be noted that not every “excellent” manager in post-sales position has good

English skills. Some only have achieved basic level. The explanation is that usually the post-sales

positions require less English communication with local customers and those managers could

apply their expertise more quickly and effectively in overseas offices compared to their peers in

pre-sales positions. It shows that within such a context, the “excellent” managers show strong

professional genre competence in language-based communication zone (Du-Babcock and

Babcock, 2007).

The result suggests that English exerts an influence on the Chinese expatriates’ communication

competency; it is the communication competence rather than English level alone that affects

expatriates’ business performance. The English certification program in progress needs to be

expanded to be a communication competency certification.

A final point is that after expatriates go abroad, no follow-up training is designed to reinforce their

learning obtained during pre-assignment training, to check the application of their training

outcome, to utilize former expatriates’ experiences in foreign offices to train new expatriates, or to

help them overcome problems or share experiences in cross-cultural communication and

management. An expatriate manager from the North Africa region mentioned that he succeeded in

breaking segregation between Chinese expatriates and local staff simply by re-arranging their

office seats! The other day an expatriate HR manager reflected that he handled local staff overtime

work issues in a smart way. Without specialized training as a sharing platform, the best practices

in cross-cultural communication within XYZ cannot be captured, accumulated, and spread

effectively.

CONCLUSION

This paper has addressed expatriates’ communication issues facing a China-based company with

first-hand cases. Through case analysis, the paper argues that the company has underestimated the

role of training to enhance cross-cultural communication competence. On the one hand, the

corporate university—the training department of XYZ—should be able to define and appraise

expatriates’ cross-cultural communication competence; on the other hand, they should be able to

provide suitable courses to enable trainees to acquire the competence. The current inadequate

training in XYZ is a major reason for expatriates’ inadequate cross-cultural business

communication competence. Training should be improved to a high level and prepared to select

future leaders for the company.



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