Opportunity and opportunism: The expatriation practices of Indian information technology multinational corporations

Although effective International Human Resource Management during an international assignment constitutes a significant factor in ensuring success of an expatriate assignment, little research has studied the expatriation practices that are associated with the onsite-offshore business model that has come to be identified with global outsourcing. The purpose of this paper is to understand the expatriation practices of an Emerging Market Multinational Corporation (EMNC), Indian Information Technology (IT) MNC, by examining the experiences of Indian IT workers, sent to work on international client projects in a western country. We used live semi-structured interviews with 47 Indian IT expatriates from Indian IT MNCs working at client sites in Australia. We find that there is inadequate attention paid to expatriation both prior to emigration and while workers are overseas and employed at client sites. Such HR shortcomings may be inherent in the onsite-offshore model that is an important feature of Indian IT business. The implications of these findings are discussed in the paper.