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The purpose of this study is to examine the mediating effects of expatriate adjustment (work, general and interaction) between individual (previous international experience, self‐efficacy, social network and cultural sensitivity) and organizational factor (direct and indirect support) and job performance.

The data were collected from 201 expatriates working in Malaysia and analyse by using structural equation modelling (Amos‐16).

The results of the study indicated that expatriate adjustment (work, general and interaction) mediate the relationship between individual and organizational factors and expatriate performance (supervisor rated).

The data were collected from the expatriates working in Malaysian universities. There can be differences between education industry and pure business organization in terms of working environment, selection process and management support. The respondents were citizens of different countries around the world which include Asia, Europe and Middle East. Even though Malaysia is a multicultural society and expatriates from any part of the world can find themselves in Malaysia, this research did not group the respondents in terms of their cultural differences and similarities with Malaysian culture.

The findings of this study suggest that human resource managers and MNC's management should provide direct and indirect support to the expatriates and their families in terms of language and cultural training, career development, logistical assistance, family mentoring, psychological counselling, job search, self‐development and social activities. Furthermore, recruitment managers and MNC's management should consider these factors before appointing any employee for international assignment. Finally, the findings of this research suggest that better expatriate performance help MNC's to perform better in their international operations which will ultimately improve the home and host country economic situation. The better performance of MNC's in their international operations through effective expatriate performance will encourage other domestic organizations to expand their operations globally.

Expatriate literature have highlighted many individual and organizational factors which affect expatriate job performance and adjustment but the role of some individual and organizational factors is still not clear and/or ignored by past researchers. For example, the role of direct and indirect support has not been well conceptualized in past studies. In addition, only a few studies have explained the importance of self‐efficacy, cultural sensitivity and social network in expatriate literature. Furthermore, role of previous international experience has generated conflicting results in past research.

International assignments are an effective tool to develop employees' cultural competencies, yet expatriate failure rates remain high. This paper aims to examine salient stakeholders' (i.e. organisations, host country nationals (HCNs) and spouses) support as antecedents of expatriates' work adjustment and task performance. It also explores work adjustment as a mediator between support and task performance.

Adopting the quantitative approach, survey data were collected from 112 expatriates who were married and based in organisations in Malaysia. Partial least squares-structural equation modelling was employed to analyse the data.

The findings validate the direct influences of perceived organisational support (POS) on work adjustment, HCN support on work adjustment, and spousal support on task performance. The indirect effect of HCN support on task performance through work adjustment was also established. When expatriates' work adjustment improves as a result of receiving HCN support, their task performance is enhanced.

This study evidences that expatriate-hiring firms should provide suitable support for expatriates when they work overseas. Local employees and spouses should likewise be tasked to help expatriates maximise their full potential in achieving successful performance in their assignments.

The contribution of this study is the exploration of the relationships between support, work adjustment and task performance among expatriates. It also adds to the limited knowledge on the role of specific stakeholders in the expatriate context.

This study aims to examine the significance of transformational leadership and social support for expatriate adjustment and performance. This study also extends relevant literature on expatriate management to examine the relationships among transformational leadership, social support, expatriate adjustment, and expatriate performance through a mechanism taking into account the moderating roles of cultural intelligence and socialization experience.

The sample was collected from 156 expatriate managers of Taiwanese multinational company (MNC) subsidiaries operating in China. Structural equation modeling (SEM) in AMOS 21 and hierarchical regression in SPSS 19 were used to test eight research hypotheses.

The SEM results indicated that transformational leadership and social support make significant contributions to expatriate adjustment and performance. The moderating roles of socialization experience and cultural intelligence were also confirmed in this study.

This study extends a theoretical model of transformational leadership and social support to examine expatriate adjustment and performance based on social learning and social exchange theories. Using a specific Chinese context, the current paper highlights the value and necessity of cross‐cultural adjustment for successful expatriation.

For decades, expatriate scholars have understood that the individual factors of cultural humility and ethnocentrism and the contextual factors of feedback and support affect expatriates’ outcomes. The study, rooted in the observation that great advice and support are often ignored by expatriates, seeks to uncover why. Based in the humility literature, the authors test whether individual differences interact with support to affect expatriate performance. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The authors surveyed a matched sample of 62 expatriates and their supervisors from one multinational organization.

The study found that expatriates higher in cultural humility benefit more from the support and feedback offered in the host national work environment which, in turn, facilitates better supervisor ratings of performance. The authors also found that expatriates’ ethnocentrism has a direct negative influence on their ratings of performance.

The findings in the study are focussed and robust, but tested within a single organization. That said, the authors believe the results have implications for expatriate selection and for ways to manage the host national environment to improve expatriate performance.

The study joins the research conversation on how expatriates’ individual differences interact with the environments in which they are placed to affect their success. This study also underscores the importance of humility in the global professional context.

In an environment of intensive global mobility, this study aims to investigate the performance role of staffing choices within diverse MNE subsidiary strategies. Incorporating the integration-responsiveness (IR) framework with a contingency perspective, this study proposes that the performance success of distinct MNE subsidiary strategies depends on staffing choices. This study argues that performance differences of staffing choices such as assigned expatriates, self-initiated expatriates, former inpatriates and host-country nationals derive from their different knowledge/experience advantages regarding the intra-firm environment and local market conditions.

The study utilizes a unique sample of 169 foreign subsidiaries located in Greece that faced the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic (in 2020). For robustness reasons, this study also captures the imposition of capital controls (in June 2015).

This study finds important mediating performance effects of a diversified human resource portfolio across distinct subsidiary strategies in difficult times. Integration strategy tends to use more assigned expatriates, locally responsive strategy tends to utilize more host-country nationals, whereas multi-focal strategy favors self-initiated expatriates and former inpatriates, with positive subsidiary performance effects accordingly. So, staffing policies that are suitable to balance the needs of Human Resource Management (HRM) portfolio differ from strategy to strategy. Moreover, this study finds that managing HRM diversity is crucial in turbulent times.

While the empirical evidence has been predominantly accumulated from large economies, largely neglecting performance effects of MNE subsidiary staffing in crisis contexts, the analysis sheds light on a small open economy (i.e. the Greek context) emphasizing rapidly environmental deterioration. The findings extend existing theorizing on international performance and HRM management by providing an integrative conceptual framework linking integration-responsiveness motivated strategies with distinct groups of high-quality human resources under contingency considerations, so creatively synthesizing largely fragmented IB and HRM research streams. The study provides valuable insights into the performance role of non-conventional staffing choices such as self-initiated expatriates and former inpatriates, given that relevant studies examine either exclusively expatriates or compare expatriates with host country nationals, reaching inconclusive results.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine job embeddedness as antecedent of job performance and organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) of expatriates.

In total, 194 expatriates from 39 nationalities were recruited through various expatriate organizations, which provided expatriate groups they had access to with a link to the online survey in English. To test the hypotheses, the author used bivariate analyses and multivariate regressions were calculated to control for alternative explanations.

As hypothesized, community embeddedness was positively related to job performance and both organizational embeddedness and community embeddedness were positively related to OCBs. Moreover, community embeddedness and organizational embeddedness showed to be positively related. In addition, organizational embeddedness partially mediated the positive relationship between community embeddedness and job performance for organizational expatriates (moderated mediation) as well as the positive relationship between community embeddedness and OCBs.

This is one of the first study to address the differential effects of organizational and community embeddedness on job performance in an expatriation context.

Researchers have been focusing on the predictors of expatriates adjustment and job performance at different levels (individual level, organizational level, and societal level) but still some of the predictors have been ignored or unclear in the expatriate literature. The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of personality traits (big five) on expatriates adjustment and job performance.

In this regards, data were collected from 201 expatriates working in Malaysia and analyzed by using structural equation modelling with Amos 16.

The findings of this study indicated that personality traits (big five) which include extroversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism positively influence expatriate adjustment which further influence expatriate performance rated by peers. In other words, expatriates adjustment (work, interaction, and general) mediate the relationship between big five personality traits (extroversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism) and expatriates job performance (task, relationship building, and overall performance).

The findings of this study will help the researchers to further understand the importance of personality traits required for successful completion of international assignment. Furthermore, the findings also suggest human resource professionals to consider these personality traits before selecting an individual for international assignment. Finally, future research directions have been proposed.

Literature on expatriate adjustment and job performance is still at developing stage. This paper shed light on the individual characteristics which work as predictors for expatriates adjustment and job performance.

The cross‐cultural and practical challenge of evaluating the management performance of Australian and Singaporean expatriates has received little research attention. This paper explores critical perceptions of performance management by analysing the results of structured interviews with Australian and Singaporean expatriate managers and human resource professionals. Contrary to initial expectations, a slight majority of respondents were satisfied overall with the fairness and accuracy of expatriate performance management practices. Their proposals for more effective performance management are analysed, focussing on the efficacy of involving multiple, cross‐cultural raters in performance appraisal. The cultural differences between Australian and Singaporean expatriates are also explored. The findings of this research provide important direction for the development of culturally sensitive international human resource management practices.

The purpose of this paper is to comprehensively explore the dimensions of Chinese culture and further investigate the underlying mechanisms via which the Chinese culture, in various dimensions, affect the overseas performance of Chinese multinational enterprises (CMNE) expatriates. Along with the awakening of China, not only CMNEs but also the Chinese culture have infiltrated the world market. The uniqueness of Chinese culture has attracted considerable attention of a majority of practitioners, while relevant research on how it affects CMNE expatriates’ performance sounds rare. In contrast to domestic employees, the performance of CMNE expatriates is more likely to be influenced by Chinese culture because of the potential cross-border cultural conflicts between the home and host countries. Additionally, the impact of Chinese culture on CMNE expatriates’ performance may vary according to different cultural dimensions.

Comparative case study is adopted for this research. After sufficient literature review and interviews with human resource (HR) staff, this paper structured the research, and then conducted 30 in-depth interviews with Chinese expatriates from both state-owned enterprises and private-owned enterprises.

This paper identifies that the Chinese culture do affect CMNE expatriates performance; however, the degree of its effect diversifies according to different cultural dimensions, namely, individual-level culture including Reniqng, Mianzi and social-level culture including power distance, Guanxi, Yinyang, Hexie and collectivism.

A limitation of this study is that the sample is not big enough and empirical tests are needed to validate or refute the model. Nevertheless, due to the fact that it is still during the period of initial study, the conceptual development raised by this paper would help us to gain good insights from these important and unexplored areas of national culture, which is being thought to affect performance in CMNEs.

Through reviewing the relevant literature and deeply analyzing Chinese culture, this paper attempts to help young Chinese MNEs to build up and/or improve performance appraisal method and system according to the unique Chinese culture, and to supply a theoretical support for HR personnel to make related policies for the sake of improving expatriate performance overseas.

This paper is the first attempt to dig and explore the whole picture, and refine the dimensions of Chinese culture from individual level and social level. It aims to lay a foundation for the research related to Chinese culture, and to some extent, supply a theoretical support to motivate more researchers to explore more ways to improve the performance of expatriates from young CMNEs.

This paper presents the whole frame of Chinese culture and from an integral Chinese perspective digs the Chinese cultural dimensions from individual level and social level for the first time. According to the social cognitive theory, this paper provides a firm foundation for scholars to understand Chinese culture as well as to analyze the related relationship with performance, and for CMNEs to develop and utilize the effect of national culture to improve the performance of expatriates overseas. So far, the research on Chinese culture and the effect of national culture overseas have not yet been well considered.

The fundamental question addressed in this research is: How do cultural intelligence, personality traits of expatriates, spousal support and cultural adjustment of expatriates impact their performance? The answer to the question is important to ensure that expatriation is successful. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The integrated framework linking the factors was formulated and tested among the 139 expatriates employed by multinational corporations (MNC) in Malaysia. A questionnaire was developed and distributed. The framework was validated using structural equation modeling technique.

Based on the analysis, the important findings are: cultural empathy and social initiatives (personality traits) of expatriates, cultural intelligence and spousal support enhance cultural adjustment of expatriates; spousal support, cultural empathy and social initiatives influence the cultural intelligence of the expatriates; and cultural intelligence and spousal support impact the performance of expatriates.

This study selected the expatriates working in MNCs and residing in Malaysia for six months and above.

This integrated view helps us understand the mechanism that leads to an expatriate’s perceived performance. Generally, researchers use “Big Five” to capture the personality traits. This research has used the construct and its dimensions that are relevant for studies on expatriation.