A Study On Cross-Cultural Adjustment Of Japanese And American Expatriates In China

This study on cross-cultural adjustment is designed to explore the relationship between cultural distance and expatriate adjustment.In the present paper,Japanese and American business expatriates who are currently working in China are surveyed with a total number of 94 subjects.Previous researches have been thoroughly reviewed,on the basis of which two hypotheses are developed to go in line with the research questions:"What are the cultural patterns of Japan and U.S.respectively and to what extent does each of the two cultures differ from the Chinese culture?" and "In what way do these cultural differences have influence on the degree of adjustment when studying Japanese and American expatriates on assignment to China".Black,Mendenhall and Oddou's three dimensions of adjustment and Shaffer, Harrison and Gilley's determinants of adjustment are adopted as the main theory,and instruments for the present paper include Black and Stephens' 14-item scale and 8-item scale,as well as the General Health Questionnaire(GHQ-12).A specially designed 34-item questionnaire is distributed to 41 Japanese subjects and 53 American subjects.Data obtained from the survey are processed in SPSS using reliability,correlation and linear regression analyses.The results partly prove the expectation that cultural distance is negatively correlated with adjustment of business expatriates.The Japanese business expatriates working in China demonstrate higher degree of adaptability than the American business expatriates in general adjustment and interaction adjustment,but not in work or psychological adjustment.Such results have been discussed from various perspectives.In spite of being a rather tentative research,this paper provides some insight for those people and organizations that are concerned with cross-cultural adjustment issue.Moreover,it is suggested that future research can include a greater subject scale and a larger variety of research methods.