Crossing Borders with Personnel Selection: From Expatriates to Multicultural Teams

Personnel selection is one of the main activities of the industrial and organizational psychologist. Yet, little is known about whether principles of personnel selection that have been developed in domestic and mainly Western (i.e., North American and European) contexts will apply in intercultural workplaces, such as those faced by expatriates. The present dissertation presents one theoretical investigation and four empirical studies into personnel selection in the intercultural and ‘alter’ cultural context, with a particular focus on both the predictors and the criteria that may be successfully employed for the selection of expatriates. In this introductory chapter, Binning and Barrett’s (1989) elaborated model for personnel decisions research is used to frame the different chapters in this dissertation. Next, this opening chapter introduces some of the main characteristics of constructs employed in the subsequent chapters. In all, three research questions that will be addressed in Chapters 2-7 are posed. These are: 1) Can performance be adequately and accurately assessed in the cross-cultural industrial and organizational psychological context (i.e. across jobs and cultural contexts), and can it be related to individual differences variables that might be employed for purposes of personnel selection? 2) Can the Five Factor Model (FFM) dimensions be usefully employed as predictors of various outcomes (i.e., job and training performance and expatriation willingness) within the crosscultural industrial-organizational psychological context? And, 3) Will predictors that match the criterion in specificity and content demonstrate a higher redictive validity than predictors that do not?