• Honeymoon
• Culture Shock
• Adjustment
• Mastery

Mendenhall and his co-workers have evolved a model for the process of cross-cultural adjustment in foreign deployment, based on their research into American managers. They portray the process as successive stages of honeymoon, culture shock, adjustment and mastery.

The honeymoon period lasts for a few weeks and, like being on holiday, everything is novel. After that period, realization sets in that one is going to have to deal in detailed ways with another culture, that friends have been left behind and new associations must be built up and so on. For many, this is the 'make or break' period. After a few months, the adjustment period begins and it is only after about 18 months that one has begun to master local differences.

The above time-scale has enormous implications for those on two-year assignments. Essentially, the greater part of this time is spent in getting used to local conditions. This timescale may be diminishing as people become more internationally aware but it is still a significant factor for the use of HCNs.

Mastery may be something of a misnomer, since no one really masters another culture, especially on deployment. But it can be seen as a relative term, the expatriate having become familiar with the local culture and able to deal with such things as local laws and procedures, as well as the development of strong workplace associations.

Mendenhall and Oddou (1991) International Adjustment

Degree of adjustment depends on:

• Self-orientation
• Organizational Culture
• Non-work issues
• Job issues
• other issues - how difficult an assignment (Hofstede distance?)

This sums up the attributes of a successful international manager and the role of technical expertise.

Note that organizational culture is important, as the management context of the subsidiary may be quite different to that of headquarters and the role that the expatriate is expected to play is different to the job at home base.