Fuzzy MCDM approach for evaluation of expatriate assignments

As international corporate activities increase, the staffing of their operations involves more strategic concerns. However, foreign assignments have many differences, and dissatisfaction with host country is a known cause of expatriate failure. This study distinguishes from previous studies, which focused on the expatriate selection process from the viewpoint of the human resource managers. From the view of expatriate candidate’s points, this paper describes a fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (fuzzy AHP) to determine the weighting of subjective judgments. When the expatriate assignments are evaluated from various aspects, such as employee personal factors, employee competencies, job characteristics, family factors, environmental factors and organization relocation support activities, it can be regarded as an fuzzy multiple criteria decision making (FMCDM) problem. Since expatriate candidates cannot clearly estimate the relative importance of each considered criterion in terms of numerical values, fuzziness is applicable. Consequently, this paper uses triangular fuzzy numbers by fuzzy AHP to establish weights for expatriate candidates, thus determining the relative importance for criteria of expatriate assignments. From the insights of this study, this article addresses this expatriate problem and offers guidelines for managers concerned with a successful expatriate assignment program.