Summary: Telgrid Inc. sells office equipment for home offices. Telgrid has recently experienced a large influx of orders and needs to expand its production capacity to keep up with demand. Telgrid's corporate offices are in the United States, but its primary manufacturing facility is located in Chile. The Chilean location is an existing facility that has a history of efficient operations. The new growth in demand stems from an expansion of the Telgrid desk line. Traditionally, Telgrid produced a limited array of desks and chairs for home offices. The new product line builds on this desk capacity to include a wider array of options. The new desks include the ability to build wiring into the desks so that electronics can be plugged directly into the desk. This electric option is available through some retrofitting of the original desk designs as well as in the newer desk models. Telgrid's research and design group engineered these new and retrofitted desk designs at the Telgrid product development laboratory. The new designs worked perfectly in the lab, but the implementation of these new designs in the Chilean manufacturing facility has not gone smoothly. The rate of defective desks has sky-rocketed, and the source of these defects has yet to be determined. To help identify and resolve this problem, Telgrid would like to send a team from the research and development group to Chile. This group would be tasked with studying the production process for the new desks and modifying it to reduce or eliminate the high defect rate. As part of Telgrid's international human resource management (HRM) team, you have been asked to select cur-rent employees for this work in Chile and prepare them for this assignment.

Discussion Questions

1. What steps should you take to recruit and select the expatriates to be sent to Chile?

2. Who should you involve in this hiring process?

3. What types of training would you provide for international assignees (IAs) for this project?

4. Specifically considering the differences between the United States and Chile, would you pay the expatriates using a home country or a host country model? What are the advantages and disadvantages of these approaches?

5. What performance metrics would be appropriate for IAs sent to Chile for this project?