Developing criteria for expatriate effectiveness: time to jump off the adjustment bandwagon

While job performance is quintessential to assessing expatriate effectiveness, significant domestic advances in performance measurement have seldom been applied to evaluating expatriate training and selection practices. Based on a critical assessment of expatriate research and deliberations about the conversion of these domestic taxonomies to the expatriate domain, this theoretical paper voices a number of propositions that should serve to benefit the field. Specifically, it is proposed that: (1) Dependent variables that have been employed thus far within the field of expatriate effectiveness are best construed as mediators between their predictors and yet to be delineated criteria of expatriate effectiveness that actually sample expatriate job performance; more adequate sampling of the expatriate job performance domain is called for; (2) behaviorally specific criteria, such as those developed by Tett et al., (Human Performance, 2000, 13(3) 205) are essential to the adequate assessment of expatriate job performance; (3) the dimensions of adaptive performance which were developed by Pulakos and colleagues (Journal of Applied Psychology, 2000, 85(4) 612; Human Performance, 2002, 15(4) 299) constitute an important subdomain of expatriate job performance; and (4) an over reliance on the generalization of domestic taxonomies will result in criterion deficiency, as expatriate specific criteria to complement these generalized criteria need to be developed.