Psychic distance and the challenges of expatriation from Brazil

Betânia Tanure · Erika Penido Barcellos · Maria Tereza Leme Fleury

78 citations0/0 files storedThe International Journal of Human Resource Management

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

International Student and Expatriate Challenges International Business and FDI Global and Cross-Cultural Management

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to explore the extent to which the psychic distance between countries poses challenges to the expatriation process of young multinational companies from emerging countries, such as Brazil. While the concept of psychic distance has been extensively explored in the literature for the analysis of the paths to internationalization of multinational companies, researchers have only recently begun to analyse its influence on expatriation processes. To this end, we reviewed studies of psychic distance and of two fields of expatriation processes that are directly influenced by the challenge of expatriates' cultural integration posed by psychic distance, namely selection and training. We also developed a multidimensional instrument to measure psychic distance and then classified the expats' countries of destination as ‘close’ or ‘distant’ in relation to Brazil. Our results show no predominance of countries that are psychically close to Brazil for the expatriations of professionals from the Brazilian companies studied. When analysing the expats' perceptions of the expatriation process, cultural integration emerged as a great challenge for expats from both ‘close’ and ‘distant’ countries. In spite of this, those companies don't seem to take this into consideration in the management of the selection and training phases of the expatriation process. In addition, we identified some differences between the expatriates and the HR managers' perceptions of the management of expatriation processes that can partially explain the high incidence of problems concerning cultural adaptation that Brazilian companies face as a result of the challenge posed by the psychic distance.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 78 citations exist upstream.

References

1978Social Learning Theory.1988The Effect of National Culture on the Choice of Entry Mode 2018Culture's Consequences 1997Modernization and Postmodernization 1997Modernization and Postmodernization: Cultural, Economic, and Political Change in 43 Societies 2004Management International Review 1991Toward a Comprehensive Model of International Adjustment: An Integration of Multiple Theoretical Perspectives 2001Distance still matters. The hard reality of global expansion.

Cited by

2014Cultural distance in international business and management: from mean-based to variance-based measures 2013Presumed cultural similarity paradox 2017Developments in Human Resource Management in MNCs from BRICS Nations: A Review and Future Research Agenda 2016Miners, politics and institutional caryatids: Accounting for the transfer of HRM practices in the Brazilian multinational enterprise 2022Following their predecessors’ journey? A review of EMNE studies and avenues for interdisciplinary inquiry

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.