Working for Chinese and Indian companies overseas: human resource challenges and the nation brand

The rapid growth of China and India as significant outward foreign direct investors has led companies from these emerging economies to look for technically skilled and culturally savvy workers for their operations overseas. This two-part empirical study surveys a sample of 120 soon to graduate students of various ethnicities at a major Canadian West Coast university and follows up with interviews of 12 students from the same group to determine their attitudes to working for Chinese and Indian companies in various countries, the reasons behind these attitudes, and the effect that ties of homophily and their cultural distance from China and India have on these attitudes. The results indicate that there are significant differences in attitudes toward working for Chinese and Indian companies across different ethnicities, and that the concepts of homophily and cultural distance can help partly explain these differences.