Editorial

Citation

Selmer, J. (2014), "Editorial", Journal of Global Mobility, Vol. 2 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/JGM-10-2014-0049

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Global Mobility, Volume 2, Issue 3

The familiarity attitude and expatriate assignments

Sayings like: “World without Strangers”, “The World is Your Oyster”, and “Any Place I Hang My Hat is Home” all reflect a certain attitude toward the world. If not familiarity, these phrases demonstrate an intention to become familiar with how the world functions and to get to know its people. Such a familiarity attitude may facilitate the success of expatriate assignments. Although previous research on expatriates and other globally mobile individuals has thoroughly investigated adjustment and performance outcomes, much less attention has been paid to global employees' personal points of view about their host location. This remains a significant gap in the literature that is both relevant and necessary to fill, especially with the rapid expansion of the many kinds of global employment alternatives involving various global contexts.

With the Journal of Global Mobility (JGM) going quarterly in 2015, future issues of JGM provide excellent opportunities to bridge this research gap. As JGM is the only academic journal to consistently and exclusively focus on global mobility issues, it means that all authors’ articles will be read by like-minded scholars and practitioners. The main focus is on white-collar or skilled workers or professionals and their immediate context at work and outside work. Our upcoming special issues – “Global Employees […] Global Families”, guest-edited by Margaret Shaffer and Mina Westman, and “Is it Just About Money? New Perspectives on Expatriate Compensation”, with Yvonne McNulty and Michael Harvey as Guest Editors – contribute to fill significant research gaps in extant literature.

JGM welcomes a wide variety of rigorous research methods, but prefers empirical contributions, with quantitative or qualitative methodology or a mixed-methods approach. Conceptual pieces like thorough theoretical developments and focussed literature reviews are also welcome. Of interest are also various levels of analysis – individual, team, and organizational, including multi-level studies. We are also interested in research from a variety of domains, such as psychology, sociology, strategic management, political science, (among others), as well as interdisciplinary studies.

The JGM LinkedIn Group is extremely successful with a membership around 1,000, enjoying a phenomenal expansion with a week over week growth rate of 100 percent from its start on May 30, 2012. To celebrate the 1,000th member, we are giving ALL MEMBERS complimentary access to the top ten JGM articles! Members of the JGM LinkedIn Group come from both industry and academic institutions, ranging from small organizations to large MNCs, from individuals just starting out with this specific interest, to CEOs. They come from world-wide locations, covering all continents of the globe. We keep in touch with this large and diverse group interested in global mobility issues and research by featuring journal updates, global mobility news, and hot topics. The JGM LinkedIn Group also provides a forum for members to share current research projects with peers and to seek new collaborations.

In this issue

The third issue of the second volume of JGM features five articles. The first article, authored by Lucy Rattrie and Markus Kittler, is a systematic literature review in the area of the job demands-resources (JD-R) model to determine its applicability to the international work context. Since this has never been explored in this manner before, the article is original. It identifies an important research gap since none of the empirical studies in the sample had explicitly considered the international work context or had clearly associated JD-R research with the IHRM literature. The following article, with Joon Hyung Park, Je’Anna Lea Abbott and Steve Werner as authors, is a conceptual piece dealing with interactions of expatriates with host country nationals (HCNs). Such interactions represent an under-researched area. The authors present a framework that delineates how a perspective-taking process induces expatriates’ effectiveness in interactions with HCNs. The third article, authored by Padmini Jayasekara and Yoshi Takahashi, uses a data set from Sri Lanka to explore the relationships between HRM practices and post-assignment behavioral outcomes of returning expatriates. From a developing country perspective, the findings emphasize the necessity of proactively managing expatriates’ post-assignment behavioral outcomes prior to repatriation through HRM practices. Although, this piece of advice may not be unique, it is certainly original based on a developing country context. The fourth contribution to this issue, with Vivien Supangco and Wolfgang Mayrhofer as authors, empirically investigates another unique sample as it deals with work role transition outcomes of company assigned and self-initiated Filipino expatriates in Singapore. Again, research on expatriates from developing countries is under-represented in the literature. Their findings that work adjustment and job satisfaction do not share common factors indicate differences in their dynamics. Further, the null results of gender, marital status, and age imply that these personal characteristics are not reliable indicators of success and are not a good basis for selection, at least not in the studied context. The last article in this issue, authored by Xavier Salamin and Doris Hanappi, is another systematic literature review, this time dealing with women and international assignments. This original study reviews articles published between 1975 and 2012 applying textual statistics and correspondence analysis to reveal the existing semantic structure of the field of research on female expatriates. In doing so, the authors are enabled to map out the development of key research themes over time as well as identify research gaps and formulate directions for future research. Especially, they find a strong need for more multilevel approaches.

The editorial team of JGM realizes that the journal has to be better than the alternatives, so reputable scholars will prefer JGM as their outlet over others. JGM provides a better service than many established academic journals, offering a prompt and professional revise and resubmit process. Our one-month turnaround policy for the first submission is very attractive and we also use the best reviewers within the field of global mobility, ensuring high-quality, developmental feedback to authors. The editorial team does its utmost for JGM to become one of the most reputable research journals within the field of international business research, completely dominating the domain of global mobility and expatriate management.

Jan Selmer