This thesis expands on expatriates’ management literature by examining what cultural challenges expatriate employees working for multinational companies located in the Republic of Congo encounter while doing their international assignments.
The study also focuses on how these cultural challenges influence their professional performances, how they cope with and what should be done to avoid facing them. The study makes use of qualitative methods where data were collected through qualitative interviews with five participants.
The research problem required the theoretical approach to be based upon two distinct theories which are experiential learning theory and social constructionist theory. Then, the data I collected are analyzed through qualitative content analysis.
The results indicate that most of expatriates encounter cultural challenges which mainly refer to language, interpersonal relationships and the notion of time. These results reveal that cultural challenges are in most of the cases due to cultural differences. The results also reveal that cultural challenges expatriates encounter while doing their international assignments influence their professional performances either positively or negatively and this depends on each individual’s experience. It has also been revealed in this study that each expatriate finds the way to overcome these challenges by being based on his own experience.
Finally, the results of this study provide some recommendations to help expatriate avoid such challenges in the future.I hope that the results of this research could be useful for multinational companies ‘managers in the preparation of their employees before sending them abroad for international assignments.