Study On The Cross-cultural Leadership Adjustment Modes Of Expatriate Executives In China

With the acceleration of economic globalization,multinational companies are all over the world,expatriate management has become the main way of implementation of transnational strategy,and expatriate executives are the key force in the strategic decision of subsidiaries,their cross-cultural leadership behavior adjustment has attracted much attention.Most of the cross-cultural leadership researches focus on the influence of leaders' own cultural values on their leadership styles,but few researches are about how to adjust their leadership styles when they are stuck in the different cultural contexts.However,in the cross-cultural interaction perspective,scholars mainly reveal the factors that influence the cross-cultural adjustment of expatriates and the extent of work adjustment,general adjustment and interaction adjustment in cross-cultural adjustment.But for expatriates leaders,when they are stuck in different cultural contexts,what is the specific contents of adjustment,how to adjust,and whether there are differences in the effect of adjustment are not well explored.In addition,the existing researches on cross-cultural leadership is mostly the general managers,not the senior executives.The strategy and direction of future largely depends on the decisions of senior managers.As the core of leadership and strategy,their actions or decisions affect the organization's overall operation.Therefore,the key of this article is to focus on the content of expatriate executives' adjustment,how to adjust the cross-cultural leadership and whether there is a difference in the effect of adjustment.The present paper analyzed the cross-cultural leadership behavior adjustment based on the data of 354 expatriate executives coming from 40 countries and 16 industries.Two themes were identified: leaders' behavioral adjustment and internal organizational coordination.Four modes of behavior adjustment were proposed : Replication,Absorption,Determination and Exploration.Distribution of modes on home country,expatriate tenure,industry,age and gender were explored.The results showed that there were significant differences between the four modes in the expatriate tenure and industry of the expatriate executives.In the discussion section,we tried to explain the differences.Furthermore,One-Way ANOVA were used to analyze 71 paired samples of expatriate executives and their direct subordinates,aiming at compare the differences of leadership effectiveness on modes of cross-cultural leadership behavior adjustment.The outcome was that the effectiveness of Replication mode was significantly lower than the others,adjustment/change is of overriding importance in China.The suggestions for the selection of the adjustment modes were given for the goals of different stages of the subsidiaries.These results contributed to the research of cross-cultural adjustment,positively impacted expatriate executives' understanding of cross-cultural leadership behavior adjustment.The article embedded the lights on role expectation,behavioral adjustment and cross-cultural adaptability for expatriate executives.