The Challenge of Cross-Cultural Adjustment : The Case of Expatriates on International Assignments between Africa and Sweden

Sammanfattning: Multinational business is in a constant search for opportunities. The present globalizationprocesses that the world is immersed in, supported by technological, social, economic and culturaladvances, is allowing markets to interact in new ways. In that manner, markets with lower previousrelevance for European companies are emerging as promising markets for the upcoming years,as it is the case for Africa. Even though trading and business connections between Europe andAfrica has existed centuries ago, the economical predictions for European business in Africaappear more promising than ever. This new set of business opportunities towards the African markets, come together with a newset of challenges. Africa’s characteristic heterogeneity presents an issue for the replication of thesame techniques of leadership, communication and way of structure used in Europe, or morespecific, in Sweden. This research study places its focus on Swedish companies with employeeson international assignments between Sweden and different African markets. In order to help tounderstand how to improve the performance of the expatriates, the researchers analyzed whatvariables affect cross-cultural adjustment. As a starting point served the Framework ofInternational Adjustment by Black, Mendehall and Oddou (1991). The findings show that the model of International Adjustment of Black, et al., (1991) is still mostlyvalid. Nonetheless, through the data analysis, researchers identified several issues discordantwith the previous mentioned model. Therefore, an updated framework was developed,aggregating the identified differences and improvements to the original framework. In the sameway, researchers formulate a set of recommendations for the companies aiming to improve thecross-cultural adjustment of their expatriates.