Enhancing Understanding on What Makes an Expatriate Successful

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By Alexander Davy, 11/8/2022

 

Expatriates, or employees sent by their company to do work in another country, are a key component to international business expansion. As such, they have been a popular subject among research pertaining to their success on missions. Despite this focus, the proper understanding of what constitutes expatriate effectiveness has been surprisingly inconclusive in the literature. Capitalizing on this opportunity, Dr. Xiaowen Chen, Alexander Davy, and Julia Hong in conjunction with Dr. William Gabrenya Jr. and Nicholas Moon from the Florida Institute of Technology (FIT) conducted a study to help both conceptualize and operationalize expatriate effectiveness so that organizations and researchers can have an improved reference on how to gauge it as such. They found three criteria to be integral to expatriate effectiveness:

•   Task Performance: Performance in tasks directly linked to organizational goals.
•   Contextual Performance: Performance in tasks not directly related to organizational goals but contribute to goal achievement.
•   Adaptive Performance: Performance in how well an employee masters skills, procedures, and environmental understanding.

Their work is currently under review with the International Journal of Cross Cultural Management (IJCCM) and have submitted abstracts to the International Association of Cross Cultural Psychology (IACCP) as well. Their goal is to continue this work by studying the effectiveness of each of the criterion in current expatriate populations.

If you are interested in reading this paper, here is the link.