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The Changing Overseas Assignment: Managing for Competitive Advantage

Today, more than ever, the overseas assignment is a staple of the managerial career. Yet, overseas postings do not necessarily have standard or normative objectives, durations, and structures despite the fact that these assignments tend to be more demanding on the employee and increasingly costly and mission-critical to the organization. The authors believe that overseas assignments need to be planned and managed holistically according to a three-point system. They recommend that decisionmakers pay balanced attention to three factors-the environment, the organization, and the employee-when planning for their mobile managers. That will enable transnational companies (TNCS) to better manage work vulner abilities in overseas assignments. The authors offer a toolkit that builds on their proposed holistic systems model. This toolkit requires decisionmakers to adopt a boundary-spanning paradigm by acknowledging all stakeholders in transnational assignments, managing local procurement of services to overseas employees, investing in developing local suppliers when necessary, and managing employee demand for services (for example, by bringing prevention and wellness programs to overseas locations).