Expatriate selection: back to basics?

Expatriate assignments are becoming increasingly unattractive to potential candidates making the unwieldy myriad of proposed selection criteria of decreasing practical value to internationally assigning firms. When the issue is more to find anyone willing to do the job rather than selecting the best candidate from a large pool of applicants, maybe basic personal characteristics can better guide corporations in their search for suitable expatriate candidates. To examine this proposition, a large sample of Western business expatriates in Hong Kong responded to a mail survey about their sociocultural and psychological adjustment. The results of the hierarchical regression analysis indicated that age had a positive association with general, interaction and work adjustment of the expatriates as well as with psychological adjustment. Gender was not associated with any kind of adjustment whereas being married had a positive relation with work adjustment. The implications for international firms of these results are discussed in detail.