The hypercompetitive global marketplace: the importance of intuition and creativity in expatriate managers

The value of expatriate managers has always been predicated to a degree on the nature of complexity of the overseas assignment and the external environment. There are two emerging and interrelated processes of environmental change occurring that could have a direct impact on the selection of expatriate managers, those being, the globalization of businesses and the resulting hypercompetitive nature of global markets. Due to the rapid rate of globalization, organizations have recognized that the global managers need different skills than their predecessors who manned multinational corporations. In addition, the hypercompetitiveness of the marketplace has placed managers under a new time perspective that tends to overshadow other managerial constraints. Therefore, two additional dimensions (i.e., intuition and creativity) are examined as being useful in the selection of expatriate managers in global organizations. This paper assesses the value of examining potential expatriate candidates on the creative and intuitional intelligences, in that it is anticipated that these two abilities will become of inordinate importance in the global hypercompetitive marketplace.