The role of the expatriate manager

Consider the cultural and institutional environment that may have an impact on
the organisation?
Huawei being a highly reputed international brand often assigns expatriates for establishment
and management of overseas tasks in order to achieve a competitive advantage in the global
markets. However, the cultural and the institutional environment can have a significant
influence on the expatriate’s performance in the organisation. The cultural customs and beliefs
at the location of the host country of the expatriates can positively or negatively influence their
work performance (Nolan and Morley, 2014). Huawei has been focused on improving the
cross-cultural training of the expatriates and the employees. At times, the reasons for low-
performance of the expatriates is cultural shock experience and maladjustment. The language
barriers accompanied with the political, economic, and social systems and practices, have a
direct influence on the expatriate performance at work. These have been a major reason why
even highly skilled expatriates have been reported to fail the assignments.

Moreover, the feature of the institutional environment clearly elaborates the various
requirements and rules to which the individuals in an organisation must conform to in order to
receive any legitimacy or support. Thus, if an organisation has a more institutionalised
environment, it will have a higher number of procedures and structures which will be governed
by external controls (Fee, et al., 2019. The institutional environment has an impact on the
expatriate’s performance as there exists a fixed and limited procedure of granting the necessary
support which is required by the expatriates at different phases of their expatriation in the
international market. This causes a barrier in the acclimatisation process of the expatriate’s as
a more customised expatriate management process is required in MNC. This is why, in order
to mitigate the impacts of the cultural and institutional environment on the expatriates, Huawei
has incorporated an Expatriate Management process (Cremer & Tao, 2015). The cultural
environment of Huawei is considered to be a primary reason for its success. The value-driven
cultural environment of the organisation allows for proper cross-cultural training and
adjustment of the environment for the expatriates in order to avoid any culture shock and
perform effectively.
Reference

Cremer, D. D. & Tao, T., 2015. Huawei’s Culture Is the Key to Its Success. [Online] Available
at: https://hbr.org/2015/06/huaweis-culture-is-the-key-to-its-success [Accessed Oct 24 2019].

Fee, A., McGrath-Champ, S. and Berti, M., 2019. Protecting expatriates in hostile
environments: Institutional forces influencing the safety and security practices of
internationally active organisations. The International Journal of Human Resource
Management, 30(11), pp.1709-1736.

Nolan, E.M. and Morley, M.J., 2014. A test of the relationship between person–environment
fit and cross-cultural adjustment among self-initiated expatriates. The International Journal of
Human Resource Management, 25(11), pp.1631-1649.