The Rush of Anxiety of Culture Shock

Culture shock occurs when a person first enters and makes contact with a new culture and feels disoriented, anxiety, frustration and isolation (Stone, 2010, p. 614). We face culture shock when we travel on holiday or on business trips. Everyone reacts to culture shock differently; some people’s reaction could be positive and some negative, just depends on how the individual would deal with change. Kalvero Oberg a Finnish anthropologist defines culture shock as “a sudden rush of anxiety that results from losing all our familiar signs and symbols of social intercourse. These signs or cues include the thousand and one ways in which we orient ourselves in the situations of daily life.”(Oberg, 1960, citied in Gibson, 2002, p. 15). In today’s world there are more companies that are involved in international business and therefore it is necessary for managers and employees to live and work overseas because of international competition. Due to growth of international companies, selecting the right employee to live and work oversea is important for an assignment. A person that works and lives overseas for a foreign company is known as an expatriate. Expatriate plays a vital role for their organization. There are ways for organizations to manage expatriates in the workforce this would be known as the cycle of expatriation (Brewster, Sparrow, Vernon & Houldsworth, 2011). Human Resource Managers can prepare employees to work overseas by using the expatriate cycle. The four cycle of expatriation are: selection, training and preparation, adjustment and repatriation. For the rest of this essay, I would like to discuss how human resource managers prepare employees to work overseas by using the four cycle process and my example would be China.

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...ed to a foreign culture. When managing expatriates there are four cycles of expatriation; they are selection, preparation and training, adjustment and repatriation. Before an assignment, selecting the most suitable candidate for an assignment is important for the company. Preparation and training will prepare the expatriate for what is to come and the negative aspects of culture shock. During the assignment the expatriate would need to adjust to the host country and their culture. After the assignment is done, the expatriate returns home and have to readjust to the home country this is known as repatriation. In the future as international businesses continues to grow, to keep up with the global changes human resource managers would need to send more expatriates on international assignments in order to achieve competitive advantage in an increasingly global economy.