Quels sont les réels challenges du bon management ? -texte en anglais

QUESTION 1

What are the challenges to effective performance management, including performance appraisal

of expatriates, in multi-national companies? Under which circumstances and in how far is it

possible to overcome these challenges?

According to Campell,Gasser & Oswald ( 1996), performance is what an organization hires one to

do, and to do well. It means that a worker does not only have to work for what he was hired to,

but also to accomplish his job duties in the best way.

Thus, Gunter K. Stahl & Ingmar Björkman (2006) defined performance management (PM) as the

evaluation and continuous improvement of individual or team performance so the operational and

strategic goals defined by the company are met in an effective and efficient way. The aim is to

evaluate and manage both behaviour and results which are the two main elements of

performance.1

It can be good to remember that an expatriate is a person who works outside his or her home

country but with a planned return to this last one or to another third country (Gunter K. Stahl &

Ingmar Björkman, 2006). An example of a third country national expatriate could be a Swedish

person working for a Spanish-based MNE in Lithuania.

Evaluating the performance can be a hard task especially for this critical personnel group of

expatriates who are not at home and who many times do not have very specific goals in their

international assignment.

PM appraisal has to face with different challenges as: 2linking job descriptions and the

compensation to performance management, working with unreliable data (based on the

expatriate’s perceptions for example), the time difference and the physical distance separation and

the local cultural situations. In addition to that, the package must be enough attractive (especially

in some locations called risk locations) while fitting into the financial budget.

As an illustration for this case, the company Nokia and its PM system have been chosen:

The multinational company Nokia Telecommunications has more than 15 years of experience in

sending and receiving employees on international assignments (Mendenhall, Oddou & Stahl,

1 Daniels, Aubrey (4th edition, July 2004). Performance Management: Changing Behavior that Drives Organizational Effectiveness.

2 http://www.scribd.com/doc/10421764/International-Performance-Management

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2007, p. 174). However, in a recent study of performance management in where this Finnish

company was the organization solely studied the results were as follows:3

The study identified 5 different types of expatriates in the company: top managers, middle

managers, business establishers, customer project employees and the R&D personnel.

According to Mendenhall, Oddou & Stahl (2007, p. 175) the first issue was that Nokia assumed

that their expatriates were well informed about what was expected from them on their new

assignment and well “trained” for it.

In addition to it, the research also revealed at least 4 other different issues within the expatriate

groups:

Top managers faced distant performance evaluations from superiors based everywhere else but in

the host country which complicated the communication between them when questions regarding

the host country were arising. Middle managers faced listening challenges and took order from

superiors based in the headquarters in Finland (communications problems as well) and the

appraisal was negotiated by host country managers on site. For the business establisher

expatriates, they only had one directive, to leave Finland to the host, “Acquire new costumers-

Period”. They faced very few performance goals which made nearly impossible to measure their

success or failure on the assignment. The 4th group, the Customer Project Employees, was the one

who had the more intensive assignment involving a three-phase project (network planning,

implementation and operation and maintenance).This group received a yearly bonus. However,

they didn’t have any agreed performance goals but only work on expectations coming from the

local managers. Finally, the R& D expatriate worked closely with their managers but their goals

were vast and generalized, which made measurement, once again, very difficult. Moreover they

were receiving any training during their assignments and their appraisal was done via bonuses

linked to their individual performance.

In this case the issue with Nokia seems to be that the company didn’t put any specific goals to all

the groups of expatriates but only to some of them and the appraisal wasn’t in concordance with

the location of the expats but only with their performance which indeed was difficult to measure.

In the case of Nokia, the definition of performance by the setting of local goals for all the

expatriates according to their area of work and

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