Transformations  in
Business & Economics

Internationalisation and Cross-Cultural Business Environment: Modelling the Training Process of Expatriates
Dainora Grundey

ABSTRACT. Business globalization trends raise the new priorities for management theory and practice. This situation increases the need of expatriates doing international assignments and working in foreign cultural settings.

The goal of this article is to create an international assignment model based on cross-cultural management theories and practices, which could help expatriates in the acculturation process in a foreign business environment.

The research tasks of the paper are as follows:

• to define the possible sources of cross-cultural differences, its impact on business practices and competencies required for expatriates;
• to analyse cross-cultural expatriate training cycles and methods;
• on the basis of the research of available services of consultancy companies working in cross-cultural training business world-wide and theoretical generalizations in cross-cultural expatriate training, to suggest the international assignment model, which could minimize the cross-cultural gap for expatriates in foreign culture.

A successfully adopted cross-cultural training model will help the employees to get acquainted with foreign values, rules, beliefs, working styles and adopt better to foreign environment. This might help the expatriates to fulfil their assignments successfully, so organizations can avoid huge assignment failure costs.

KEYWORDS: internationalisation, international business, expatriates, training, cross-cultural dimensions.

JEL classification: F23, M14, M16, M53.