Voices of experience: a comparison of alternatives against the traditional expatriate assignments

The bulk of research on expatriate assignments has been focused on traditional expatriate assignments which typically involves a timeframe of over a year or more. Research has shown that the traditional expatriate assignments are plagued by high costs, high failure rates, and low rates of retention. Increasingly organizations are exploring other alternatives to conduct international assignments through the use of what I call the alternative expatriate assignment. These alternative assignments hold the promise of addressing some of the shortfalls of the more traditional assignments. In this study, I apply the Dickmann & Harris (2005) traditional expatriate career capital framework to two particularly popular forms of the alternative expatriate assignment, namely the short-term expatriate assignment and the self-initiated expatriate assignment. The model looks at the individual's perspective on three important career capital categories in the model, knowing whom, knowing why, and knowing how. While only exploratory in design and providing only cursory level of analysis, there appears to be support for the use of the Dickmann & Harris (2005) framework to explore the career capital reasons why alternative expatriate's choose to accept short-term and self-initiated international assignments. The study highlights some key similarities and differences between the traditional and the alternative expatriate assignments and has the potential to inform organizations about the alternative expatriate values from a career capital perspective.