Rotterdam PhD research shows what makes expatriates successful at work
04 Jan 2008
When an employer plans to send a member of staff to work at a branch in another country, how should he choose the most promising candidate? In his PhD thesis ‘Grenzen verleggen met personeelsselectie: van expatriates naar multiculturele teams’ (Intercultural job performance criteria: unravelling key issues in criterion development), psychologist Stefan Mol investigates which selection methods are most successful.
Too often, research focuses on a person’s ability to adapt, but it makes more sense to look at their potential performance at work. Mol received a PhD from Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands on 6 December 2007 for his research.
Stefan Mol looked at how staff selection can be improved in work settings where expatriates of different nationalities have to work together. Most psychological research on this subject focuses strongly on predicting how a person is likely to adapt to the culture of the host country. Mol discovered that this tells us little about their ultimate performance at work. In his view, it is more useful to look at personality traits that can predict performance.
Mol examined a large number of personal characteristics to establish whether they had any bearing on expatriates’ performance at work. He found that four of the ‘Big Five’ characteristics make the best predictors: extraversion, emotional stability, conscientiousness (a combination of precision and reliability) and friendliness. Openness was not found to be a predictor of expatriate performance. These findings concur strongly with those of research among non-expatriate workers.
However, the Big Five say less about a person’s willingness to work abroad. In this case, it is better to look at specific prior international experience, such as travel or having friends from other countries.
Mol also performed part of his research in South Africa, where he attempted to predict the training performance of prospective police officers. He found that the dominant culture in the workplace played an important role in assessing performance. Reported differences in performance had more to do with the assessors than with those being assessed. Mol attributes this finding to the collectivist culture in South Africa.