Expatriates and Problems Related to Them

As companies grow and become multinational and opening factories in other countries it is sometimes necessary to send management teams from the parent company to the other businesses. This is so they can oversee them and establish a management system that the parent company would want them to adopt. It is also to oversee quality control and training of staff and management. As the case study shows it can cause many problems for the expatriates and in some cases causing them to return home early or that on their return to the parent company they leave it in a short space of time.
The case study focuses on JKL which is a pharmaceutical company based in New Zealand. It also has operation in Malaysia, India and Greece which perform well and basically run well themselves. After that it opened a new site in Pennsylvania, US sending a lot of its staff and management to run it from New Zealand.
The company was very pleased with these operations which encouraged it to buy a Russian pharmaceutical company Zagorski. JKL style of management was to encourage management at all levels to be able to act and make decisions independently and there were financial rewards for this. It also welcomed input from the shop floor workers by using suggestion schemes which again rewarded good ideas from their staff.
JKL employed a new female head of HR she felt she was suited to the job because of her previous international experience. She was told by the CEO of the company that they would need to send 10 of their managers to oversee their new factory in Russia. …