With the advent of globalization, the international assignments of the executives have gone up significantly. This in turn, has led the HRD to develop new strategies to cope with the new dispensation. Globalization has become a dominant and a challenging phenomenon for enterprises looking for an expansion strategy. The trajectory for growth in today's competitive marketplace is well-marked by an increase in the number of foreign operations and making the presence felt off-shore. Added with this need for going global are the new challenges of increasing international competition, economic changes, rise of consumerism and growing market complexity. In India, the decade of the 1990s saw a paradigm shift in the way businesses conduct themselves. This decade was marked with Indian markets opening itself to the multinational and the Indian companies crossing the domestic waters.

With this increasing globalization, the number of corporate executives crossing international borders has grown manifold and the cross-border management of these executives dominates or occupies the front seat in the agenda of the human resource department of any Multinational Company (MNC). Various researches have shown that in today's highly competitive and complex globalized marketplace, the success of a foreign entity is strongly and directly related to its capability of successfully transferring its critical human resources across borders.