Organisational

Psychology
Simmy Grover
ucjthkg@ucl.ac.uk
Rm 228, 26 Bedford Way
Culture Shock &
Working Abroad
Lecture 14
What is Culture?
• It is like an iceberg
• At the tip – social etiquette – do’s and don’ts
• Underlying this are values/beliefs, patterns of thinking and
patterns of communication
• Social, economic, historical and ideological factors

Organisational Psychology
• Vary across countries, organisations, etc
• Not homogeneous
• Cultures are dynamic, inconsistent and multifaceted

• Corporate Culture is defined as a system of informal rules that

spells out how people are to behave most of the time (Deal & 3
Kennedy, 1982)
The Effect of Culture
• The processes by which culture influences an individual’s or
group’s behaviour are far from clear

• There are likely to be individual differences in the effect on

Organisational Psychology
culture on behaviour

• Academic research on culture has mostly focused on Western,

English speaking cultures

• There is a potentially naïve assumption that the influence and

processes underlying organisational performance are the
same across cultures 4
Culture Shock
• What is it?
• The early and profound experiences of an individual in a new culture
• Something unexpected about the new culture but may potentially
lead to a negative evaluation of your home culture or the new culture

Organisational Psychology
• Derived from anthropology – Oberg (1960) mentioned 6 factors:
• Strain
• A sense of loss and feelings of deprivation
• Rejection – rejected by or rejecting others
• Confusion – in role and expectations
• Surprise, anxiety, disgust and indignation – once aware of cultural
differences
• Feelings of impotence – unable to cope with new situation 5
 A representation of possible patterns of migration based on
proposed length of stay and motives for migration
Forced / involuntarily

Refugees

Diplomats

Business people

Organisational Psychology
Motives for migration
Foreign workers

Students

Tourists 6
Voluntarily/ happily
Short Long
Adaption strategies
Cleveland, Mangone & Adams (1960)

• Two extremes of the adaption continuum

Organisational Psychology
• Individuals who act as if had never left home

• Individuals who immediately go native

• No understanding of why some individuals

experience culture shock and others don’t 7
What about the upside to Culture Shock?
• There is general agreement that exposure to a new culture is
stressful

• But little research has examined the potential benefits of

Organisational Psychology
culture shock:

• Sensation seekers – individuals who are energised by different

and exciting environments

• For those whose initial discomfort leads to personal growth and

learning
8
What determines Culture Shock?

• The quality and quantity of culture shock has been shown to

be influence by the amount of difference between the home
culture and the culture they are visiting/working in

Organisational Psychology
Home
Home Culture
Culture Host
Host Culture
Culture Culture
Culture Shock
Shock

9
Theories that explain Culture Shock
1. Psychology of loss – akin to grieving for home culture
2. Locus-of-control – fatalistic vs. instrumental
3. Social Darwinism – selective migration
4. Realistic expectations

Organisational Psychology
5. Calculation based on negative life events
6. Social support network
7. Value differences between home and host culture
8. Social skills

Each theory offers its own intervention for dealing with culture 10
shock
Three Theoretical Groupings
• Culture learning perspective
• Acquiring culturally relevant social knowledge

• Stress, coping and adjustment process

Organisational Psychology
• Personality, social support network, skills and abilities

• Social identity and inter-group relations

• How individuals see themselves and their groups affects how
they deal with others from a different group
• Social and individual factors influence a person’s sense of
themselves
11
The U-Curve Hypothesis
• Honeymoon stage

• Crisis

Organisational Psychology
• Recovery

• Adjustment

12
 The U-Curve Hypothesis

Organisational Psychology
13
Hofstede’s Dimensions for Culture
1. Power distance
2. Individualism vs. Collectivism
3. Masculinity vs. Femininity – competitive vs. consensus
orientated

Organisational Psychology
4. Uncertainty avoidance
5. Long term orientation vs. short term normative orientation
6. Indulgence vs. Restraint

14
Differences in Culture
• https://www.hofstede-insights.com/country-comparison

Organisational Psychology
15
Why is this important for Organisational
Psychologists?
• An estimated 232 million people live and work outside their
countries of origin worldwide (OECD, 2013)

• Two types of expatriates:

Organisational Psychology
• Corporate-sponsored
• Self-initiated

• Expatriates typically represent high-skilled talent

• Working abroad has been linked to successful future

leadership for the individual but what is the ROI for the
16
organisation who sponsor working abroad?
Expatriate Failure
• This is defined as “expatriates who have to be recalled or
dismissed because of the inability to function effectively in a
foreign assignment”

Organisational Psychology
• Failure rate is estimated to be between 10 – 40%

• Top 2 reasons for expatriate failure:

• Inability of manager’s spouse and the inability of the manager to
adjust to a different physical or cultural environment

(Tung, 1981)
17

Kraimer, Bolino, & Mead (2016)

Key themes that have been examined by
research

• Expatriate failure
• Expatriate selection and training
• International adjustment

Organisational Psychology
• Spouse and family adjustment
• Repatriation issues
• The role of expatriate assignments
• Gender issues
• Reasons managers accept expatriate assignments

18

Kraimer, Bolino, & Mead (2016)

Is manager effectiveness universal?
• Black and Porter (1991) examined three samples of managers:

HK
HK Chinese
Chinese
US
US Managers
Managers US
US Managers
Managers
Managers
Managers in
in
in
in the
the US
US in
in Hong
Hong Kong
Kong
Hong
Hong Kong
Kong

Organisational Psychology
• The US managers reported similar behaviours whether they
were in the US or HK

• However, these behaviours positively related to job

performance for the US managers in the US, they did not
related to job performance for US managers in HK or HK 19
Chinese managers in HK
Kraimer, Bolino, & Mead (2016)
What leads to success?
• Expatriates reported the following traits for success (Arthur & Bennett,
1995):
• Technical skills
• Host-country language fluency
• Intercultural competencies

Organisational Psychology
• Relational skills
• Family support
• Flexibility/adaptability

• Cultural flexibility and sensitivity

• Extraversion, Emotional Stability, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness and

Open Mindedness
20
• Cross-cultural training
Kraimer, Bolino, & Mead (2016)
Coming home is not that easy
Repatriation issues:
• International experience not valued at work
• Lack of interest from colleagues to learn about international
experience

Organisational Psychology
• Career growth stalled
• Lack of organisational support
• Gap between expatriates expectations about return and the
reality of return

Repatriate dissatisfaction leads to increased employee turnover

• Employees that the organisation has just invested in by
21
sending them overseas

Kraimer, Bolino, & Mead (2016)

Issues with the research
• Mostly qualitative, cross-sectional and self-report data

• Heavily driven by practitioner needs

• Although factors related expatriate success have been examined little

Organisational Psychology
appears to have changed

• Very focused on the individual – little examination of how

environment/supervisor/HR practices in host country influence
expatriate success

• Little research on ROI for organisation that sponsors expatriates

22
• Most leveraged theories are from US domestic research
 Questions?

Organisational Psychology
23
References / Further Reading
• Chapters 13 & 15 from Furnham (2 nd Edition) The Psychology of Behaviour at Work.

• Kraimer, M., Bolino, M., & Mead, B. (2016). Themes in expatriate and repatriate research over four decades: What
do we know and what do we still need to learn?. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational
Behavior, 3, 83-109.
• Baruch, Y., Altman, Y., & Tung, R. L. (2016). Career mobility in a global era: Advances in managing expatriation and
repatriation. The Academy of Management Annals, 10(1), 841-889.
• Gelfand, M. J., Aycan, Z., Erez, M., & Leung, K. (2017). Cross-cultural industrial organizational psychology and
organizational behavior: A hundred-year journey. Journal of Applied Psychology, 102(3), 514.

Organisational Psychology
• Maertz Jr, C. P., Takeuchi, R., & Chen, J. (2016). An episodic framework of outgroup interaction processing:
Integration and redirection for the expatriate adjustment research. Psychological bulletin, 142(6), 623.
• Oh, I. S., Guay, R. P., Kim, K., Harold, C. M., Lee, J. H., Heo, C. G., & Shin, K. H. (2014). Fit happens globally: A meta ‐
analytic comparison of the relationships of person–environment fit dimensions with work attitudes and
performance across East Asia, Europe, and North America. Personnel Psychology, 67(1), 99-152.
• Dragoni, L., Oh, I. S., Tesluk, P. E., Moore, O. A., VanKatwyk, P., & Hazucha, J. (2014). Developing leaders’ strategic
thinking through global work experience: The moderating role of cultural distance. Journal of Applied Psychology,
99(5), 867.
• Stahl, G. K., & Caligiuri, P. (2005). The effectiveness of expatriate coping strategies: The moderating role of cultural
distance, position level, and time on the international assignment. Journal of Applied Psychology, 90(4), 603.
• Ramos, M. R., Cassidy, C., Reicher, S., & Haslam, S. A. (2015). Well‐being in cross‐cultural transitions: discrepancies
between acculturation preferences and actual intergroup and intragroup contact. Journal of Applied Social
Psychology, 45(1), 23-34.
• Furnham, A. (2017). Personality differences in managers who have, and have not, worked abroad. European 24
Management Journal, 35(1), 39-45.
• Adam, H., Obodaru, O., Lu, J. G., Maddux, W. W., & Galinsky, A. D. (2018). The shortest path to oneself leads
around the world: Living abroad increases self-concept clarity. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision
Processes, 145(C), 16-29.