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The purpose of this article is to enhance understanding of influences on interaction between corporate personnel and development specialists and line functions associated with expatriating managers. Line managers are expected to accept greater responsibility for people management and development. But line managers' strategies for managing risks inherent in supervising expatriate managers may cause to surface incompatibilities with specialists' corporate “policy conscience” role. A pluralistically inclined perspective on “managerial interest streams” offers insights into inter‐group perceptions and behaviour.

Focusing on organisational actors' interpretations, a non‐standardised survey by e‐mail, covering a small sample of expatriate managers (n=20) employed in various countries by a large UK‐headquartered healthcare retail group, was complemented by semi‐structured interviews with personnel and development specialists in a further seven large multinational companies.

Potential tensions around the application of corporate expatriation policy may be attributed to factors “educating” line and specialist orientations to expatriate managers.

The value of the paper is in the development of an original model sketching pluralistically located interaction around expatriation management. While limited to an exploratory empirical investigation, the practical implications derive from specification of opportunities and threats to partnership building between those involved in expatriating managers.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the costs and benefits of expatriation persists as a difficult challenge for many organizations and scholarly guidance on the process of compiling and allocating the costs of expatriation remains insufficient. The authors argue therefore that there is a need for developing an instrument that enables practitioners to calculate an estimate of the total cost of expatriation which can eventually be set in relation to the expected benefits of an assignment.

To investigate how the total cost of expatriation can be computed, the authors provide an exploratory overview of previous research on international assignments, expatriate return of investment (eROI) and principles of cost accounting. Then, essential costs of expatriation are discussed and combined in one model for assessing the total cost of expatriation.

The authors will demonstrate that expatriation costs are best understood as process costs. In addition, the authors will provide a tool to calculate eROI.

The paper show how to determine the costs of major phases of expatriation. It allows us to calculate the break-even point of an international assignment and it can be used to compare this investment with alternative methods of international mobility. Most importantly, the authors are able to identify crucial cost drivers which allow the development of more precise and targeted recommendations for management action.

A decade has passed since Dabic et al. (2015) published a systematic review of the evolution of the expatriate literature from 1970 to 2012. Moreover, the past five years have been turbulent, with many global crises affecting organizational approaches to the global movement of people, particularly expatriate workers. Thus, this article seeks to understand how global mobility has continued to evolve during such turbulence and propose avenues for future research.

In this study, the authors undertook a constructive replication (Köhler and Cortina, 2021) of the systematic literature review conducted by Dabic et al. (2015), informed by guidelines offered by Donthu et al. (2021) for the period 2013 to 2022. The authors conducted a performance analysis of 1,517 academic articles about expatriates and broader globally mobile workers. Additionally, the authors analyzed all expatriate-related special issues published in the past decade and provide a narrative review of seminal works from the past five years.

The expatriation field has grown exponentially; greater attention has been paid to contextualizing research, particularly concerning emerging markets, although the field remains Western-dominant. This analysis stresses the increasingly strategic nature of expatriation at a time when global staffing has become dramatically challenging. Thus, this review highlights the need for more interdisciplinarity at different levels between expatriation and the field of strategy. The authors argue the need for a multifaceted understanding of the expatriation experience.

The authors offer a constructive replication of a bibliometric literature review extended by a narrative analysis to complement a critical perspective on a large set of bibliographic data on the broad subject of expatriation. This addition offers an integrated view of the different themes identified by the bibliometric analysis and paves the way for future replication studies to examine how fields evolve.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a timely assessment of the influence of human resource (HR) processes and policies on expatriates’ employability, using a Dutch international engineering firm as the study setting.

The qualitative study, based on in-depth interviews with 15 respondents in various roles, such as expatriates, repatriates, HR managers and line managers, is complemented by a document analysis of HR policy reports about expatriation processes.

Expatriation management influences the internal employability of engineering expatriates, yet most HR policies related to expatriation work are counterproductive in terms of in-company employability of expatriates.

Further research could extend this single case study by differentiating engineering from management functions and addressing employability implications for other assignments and other forms of expatriation. Comparisons are also possible across various stakeholders with regard to social support.

HR management can follow several prescriptions revealed by this study to increase expatriates’ employability within the organization.

This study is among the first to relate expatriation processes to the dimensions of employability.

This paper aims to integrate the perspectives of expatriation and repatriation not as two unrelated stages but rather as one integrated process.

A sample comprising 94 human resource (HR) representatives from large Taiwanese multinational corporations (MNCs) provided objective data on the organizational expatriate/repatriate practices.

The use of developmental assignments was positively related to organizational repatriate turnover, but such a positive relationship was significant only when MNCs used low levels of repatriation support practices. Organizational repatriate turnover was negatively related to employee willingness for expatriation and the use of developmental assignments increased employee willingness for expatriation. Organizational repatriate turnover was a competitive mediator between the use of developmental assignments and employee willingness for expatriation. Moreover, organizational repatriate turnover mediated the relationship when MNCs used low levels of repatriation support practices, but not when MNCs used high levels of repatriation support practices.

MNCs should ensure the use of development assignments is matched with high levels of repatriation support practices and treat expatriation and repatriation management as one integrated process.

As the world economy becomes more integrated, MNCs are increasingly challenged in their efforts to send employees abroad on expatriate assignments that are developmental by design, to reduce organizational repatriate turnover and to increase employee willingness for expatriation. However, there is a lack of understanding about how they are all linked.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which a destination's security level affects the relationship between personality traits and individuals' expatriation willingness.

The authors apply an experimental vignette methodology using a 2 × 1 between subjects-design with two destinations characterized by different security levels (dangerous vs. safe) among 278 participants (students and employees). Partial least squares multigroup analysis (PLS-MGA) was employed to test the hypotheses.

The findings indicate that different personality variables appear to impact individuals' expatriation willingness depending on the security level of a destination: emotionality and conscientiousness predicted expatriation willingness to dangerous environments, whereas openness to experience predicted expatriation willingness to safe environments. The personality traits of honesty–humility, extraversion and agreeableness were not found to influence expatriation willingness in either scenario.

The study discusses a set of practical recommendations for the selection and the management of eligible individuals who are willing to expatriate to dangerous locations.

The study is among the first to examine the influence of personality on expatriation willingness in safe and dangerous environments at the same time. It advances prior research by providing a more nuanced understanding of the context-specific effects of personality on expatriation willingness.

Within the current discourse on contemporary careers and the context of international assignments, this paper seeks to conduct a study of a large European MNC, with the aim of theory development on expatriation/repatriation.

A qualitative study, based on semi‐structured interviews in a major financial institution.

Motivation to expatriate falls into two distinct categories – company initiated assignments; and self‐initiated, career orientated and/or self‐development focused. The authors propose a two dimensional model to depict the emergence of a new expatriation path alongside the traditional one – differentiating those who respond to an international assignment call within a clearly framed career development path; and those embarking on international assignment as, primarily, a personal growth opportunity. A distinctive sub‐group of corporate self‐initiated expatriates is identified for the first time.

A qualitative study within one company.

The emergent models could be utilized by HR managers to shape future policies and practices for global assignments.

Providing a new model to explicate the relevance of a protean career attitude in a global boundaryless career environment; outlining of new emergent international career trajectories, in particular corporate self‐initiated careers.

The purpose of this study is to validate Ozdemir and Cizel’s (2007) model of expatriate management. The researchers tested the framework developed initially by Ozdemir and Cizel (2007) by relating the four stages of the expatriation process with the performance and commitment of expatriate managers.

The research population consists of expatriate managers from five Anglo-Saxon countries. A total of 110 surveys were collected. However, due to missing data and internal inconsistencies (i.e. random answering), six surveys (5.5%) were deleted resulting in a sample size of 104.

Ozdemir and Cizel’s four-stage process model (2007) has been established as a valid, useful model for creating an expatriation management system. Few expats interviewed indicated their selection was systematized or that they received training in advance of the assignment. Families of these expats received even less consideration despite the fact that many expat failures result from family failure to adapt to the new culture. Very few companies managed the repatriation process at all. Given the substantial correlations between components of Ozdemir and Cizel’s model and performance and commitment, these finding are no less than troubling.

As companies are becoming increasingly international, the number of expatriates working around the world is growing. While the management of expatriates has been studied extensively in North America and Europe, research into the expatriate process in the UAE is still in its infancy. The present study endeavors to begin to fill this research gap.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the factors needed for the development of global human resources for leadership assignments in foreign subsidiaries. The paper aims to find an answer to enhance expatriate mission accomplishment rate at subsidiaries abroad.

This study examines the development of global human resources. In-depth face-to-face interviews were employed to collect data from eight senior HR managers in three financial institutions in Taiwan, while data from 28 expatriates in the overseas subsidiaries were obtained from asynchronous e-mail interviews. Conventional content analysis was used to code categories directly from the data.

The results of the study revealed that organizational policies do not focus on developing global human resources. To portray a global image, the focus is on staffing overseas subsidiaries with foreigners and Taiwanese that can speak English. Development to prepare staff for expatriation is limited to pre-departure training that focused mainly on language and cultural awareness training. However, organizational support during expatriation and repatriation is important. Expatriates view security briefing crucial and familiarization visit helps them to decide whether or not to accept expatriation. Organizational policies favor those that were not expatriated in terms of career progression deter managers from accepting international assignments.

It highlights some best practices in developing global human resources taking into consideration the herd mentality and social perspective. Social support, social learning and social capital are instrumental in developing global human resources as these hasten cultural adjustment.

This paper aims to examine the critical role played by cultural flow in fostering successful expatriate cross-border transitions.

The authors develop and test a model on the interplay among cultural intelligence, organizational position level, cultural flow direction and expatriate adaptation, using a data set of 387 expatriate on cross-border transitions along the Belt & Road area.

The authors find that both organizational position level and cultural flow moderate the relationship between cultural intelligence and expatriate adaptation, whereby the relationship is contingent on the interaction of organizational position status and assignment directions between high power distance and low power distance host environments.

Previous research has shown that higher levels of cultural intelligence are positively related to better expatriate adaptation. However, there is a lack of research on the effect of position difference and cultural flow on such relationship. Our study is among the first to examine how the interaction between cultural flow and organizational position level influences the cultural intelligence (CI) and cultural adjustment relationship in cross-cultural transitions.