What is expatriate management?

Citation

Selmer, J. (2019), "What is expatriate management?", Journal of Global Mobility, Vol. 7 No. 3, pp. 237-238. https://doi.org/10.1108/JGM-09-2019-073

What is expatriate management?

Expatriate management is a concept that may include two different activities: management of expatriates and management by expatriates. The former includes all the traditional activities undertaken by organizations to manage their assigned expatriates (AEs), from recruitment to repatriation. Management by expatriates is associated with most cross-cultural and other issues that foreign managers encounter in a host location, from language problems and communication difficulties to leadership challenges. These two activities, however, are not mutually exclusive and may actually overlap since many AEs may need support and help from the parent country organization to successfully discharge their managerial duties.

Lately, a host of non-traditional global workers have emerged, such as self-initiated expatriates, inpatriates, international business travelers, short-term assignees and international commuters. Recently, expatriates in non-corporate communities, such as diplomats, academics, international school teachers, international volunteers, military, missionaries and sports professionals have also been studied. Healthcare employees are another type of expatriate group, but despite their growing international importance, they have seldom been investigated. Similarly, the vast numbers of low-status expatriates, from construction workers in the Middle East to domestic helpers in Southeast Asia, have been neglected by scholars. Many of these foreign workers need to be managed and some of them perform management tasks themselves.

This is the emerging picture of expatriate management, from issues with traditional corporate AEs to a plethora of global workers and the challenges they face. With a focus on expatriate management in its widest possible meaning, the Journal of Global Mobility (JGM) welcomes research on all forms of expatriates.

A new feature of JGM is an Editorial Review Board (ERB) of dedicated specialists within our area performing highly developmental reviews. This is also done in a prompt and timely fashion, underlining the JGM policy of a one-month turnaround time for the first submission of a manuscript until a decision is made. This probably makes the journal the fastest in our area. Since JGM is the only academic journal to consistently and exclusively focus on global mobility and expatriate management, the slogan that JGM is managed by experts for experts becomes ever more true by introducing an expert ERB. Since the journal was launched, the Editorial Advisory Board of JGM reads as a Who’s Who in our area and the editorial team and authors are also all specialists.

Recognized as a fast developing newcomer, JGM went straight into the second level of the Chartered Association for Business Schools (UK) Academic Journal Guide 2018. Before this, JGM was indexed in Scopus (CiteScore 2018: 1.93) and ESCI. The journal is also ranked by the Australian ABDC List as a B journal and ranked by the Nordic countries and Brazil.

We have two special issues this year: The Dark Side of Global Mobility, edited by Benjamin Bader, Tassilo Schuster, Anna Katharina Bader and Margaret Shaffer and Low Status Expatriates edited by Chris Brewster, Washika Haak-Saheem and Jakob Lauring.

The journal is also involved in social media featuring JGM-associated content. We have a JGM LinkedIn Group, a JGM Facebook Group (please contact Yvonne, ymcnulty@expatresearch.com if you want to join) and a Twitter account, @JanSelmer_JGM.

Despite its specialist emphasis, JGM publishes a variety of rigorous research methods, thorough theoretical developments and focused literature reviews. We also welcome multi-level studies and research from a variety of academic domains, as well as cross-disciplinary studies.

Unlike many other academic research journals, JGM welcomes replication studies. We believe that, as important that it is for science to break new grounds, previous discoveries must be examined again to reaffirm or disconfirm their existence. Replication studies can be of various forms, where previous results are investigated with same or different methodologies and settings as well as providing extensions of primary research.

In this issue

The first article, authored by Chenchen Li, Ling Eleanor Zhang and Anne-Wil Harzing, is a conceptual paper trying to uncover how employees on international assignments respond to exposure to new cultures. Their unique approach to this well-known topic includes proposing a dynamic framework of cultural identity negotiation strategies by drawing upon exclusionary and integrative reactions theory in cross-cultural psychology. Metaphors for these different types of strategies are introduced: “ostrich” (monocultural strategy), “frog” (multicultural strategy), “bird” (global strategy) and “lizard” (cosmopolitan strategy). The second paper, written by Liisa Mäkelä, Hilpi Kangas and Vesa Suutari, deals with satisfaction with an expatriate job and the link to leadership. Providing new knowledge on leader distance in the context of expatriation, they examine how physical distance and functional distance between expatriate and supervisor are related to expatriate job satisfaction. Based on a sample of 290 Finnish expatriates, results show that low functional distance with a supervisor is related to greater satisfaction with the expatriate job while physical distance is not directly connected. However, among those whose functional distance is low, working in the same country with the leader is linked to greater expatriate satisfaction than among those who were physically distant. Chipoong Kim, Chul Chung and Chris Brewster are the authors of the next contribution to this issue. They propose an integrative typology to identify and classify various types of traditional and alternative subsidiary staffing options and evaluate them in relation to social capital and knowledge flows across multinational organizations. Identifying nine types of subsidiary staffing options, they include and classify traditional and alternative staffing options while highlighting types which need further research. The purpose of the fourth article, written by Susan Kirk, is to explore the interplay between identity and global mobility in the careers of senior, female talent as well as identify the role organizations can play in enabling women to overcome identity constraints. Results based on data from 38 in-depth interviews with senior managers in a large, multinational organization indicate that female talent has more fluid interpersonal boundaries than men, creating on-going identity struggles equivalent to a glass border. The last article in this issue is authored by Marie-France Waxin, Chris Brewster and Nicolas Ashill and deals with how expatriate time to proficiency is associated with individual antecedents but moderated by home country. Results based on survey data from AEs from different countries in India show that social orientation, willingness to communicate, confidence in technical abilities and active stress resistance reduce expatriate time to proficiency but also that the individual antecedents of expatriate time to proficiency vary significantly across home countries suggesting that these antecedents interact with context, here home country.

Expatriate management is becoming a much more varied field of study as well as covering wider ground. By recognizing new phenomena to study within our field, the traditional concept is expanding from AEs to include just about all workers on temporary assignments abroad. This is the amalgamation of global mobility issues and expatriate management that is the essence of what JGM is all about. Our ERB delivers highly developmental reviews in a prompt and timely fashion and the JGM editorial team facilitates your way to a favorable publication decision. You can count on being supported by a dedicated group of specialists making our motto for JGM a reality: managed by experts for experts. And, the very core of JGM is expatriate management, in its widest possible form, making the journal the leading outlet for academic research within this domain.