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Little is known about the attraction, development, and attrition factors that impact on expatriates’ decision making in relation to international assignment opportunities, nor is there clear understanding as to how global mobility outcomes impact on global talent management (GTM). The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize the attraction, development, and attrition of expatriates as a process that is focussed on two core elements of expatriate ROI (eROI) – corporate ROI (cROI) and individual ROI (iROI). Further, the authors adopt an innovative approach by conceptualizing how global mobility is linked to GTM.

Applying psychological contract theory, the authors draw on empirical data from two large studies to compare the perspectives of mobility managers (the cROI inputs) with those of long-term assignees (expatriates; the iROI inputs) to identify how global mobility outcomes can impact on GTM.

By comparing and contrasting corporate and individual perspectives, the findings show a more complete picture of expatriation in practice than has been offered in prior research. Doing so highlights synergies and conflicts in the desired support provided for, and outcomes expected from, global mobility and GTM programs.

The research adds to the literature by demonstrating how cROI and iROI combine to influence overall global mobility outcomes for multinational corporations, and how these, in turn, impact on GTM initiatives and overall GTM success. It extends previous research to specifically link global mobility to GTM, and adds to the limited empirical literature on eROI. The research also advances understanding of the employment relationship during expatriation by identifying new factors and consequences pertaining to psychological contract fulfillment. Implications for future research are presented.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the story of 15 TEFL/TESOL English language teachers who spend their lives working globally.

Interviews from the research based on the grounded approach generated, among others, three inter-related themes, namely, the global drift, distinctive cultural dispositions and the concept of global quality.

The global drift symbolizes interviewees’ mobility pattern and captures their Hong Kong experience in four states – adaptation, drifting in global comfort, drifting in global discomfort and bitter/sweet home, each representing a different quality of mobility which contributes to the development of cultural dispositions. Findings of cultural disposition home and openness are considered in relation to studies of its kind. Four aspects of home perceptions in the data are identified. While interviewees developed complex and varied notions of home, it is argued that the geographical home remains a significant resource in the making of home. Data also suggest that most interviewees’ openness is limited – it is selective, functional and transient. Global quality, a concept emerged from the research, summarizes the distinctive cultural traits of the community of the globals. It overlaps with, but does not necessarily equate with, cosmopolitanism.

The conclusion relates the study, including the concepts generated from this research, to cosmopolitanism. Two theoretical constructs are employed in the analysis: form of mobility and nature of mobility.

This paper aims to evaluate the career patterns and global mobility trajectories of hospitality and tourism graduates that are relevant for global knowledge and local talent management.

This study maps and assesses the public profiles of over 2,000 hospitality and tourism graduates from five institutions each from a different territory using a popular online professional network.

The findings highlight a network of worldwide mobility from hospitality and tourism graduates of the five institutions. The findings also suggest five different types of mobility trajectories (i.e. stateside, intra-regional, continental, inter-regional and global) and career patterns (i.e. rooted, prospector, seeker, two-homes and wanderer).

Geographical mobility of graduates in tourism and hospitality is one of the less studied phenomena; however, it is important to understand due to growing concerns regarding globalization of the workplace and internationalization of education.

This study provides insights into how knowledge transfer and talent management could be impacted by the global graduate movements.

This is one of the first studies to date to combine mobility trajectories with a classification of career patterns to provide implications relevant for global knowledge and local talent management.

This paper aims to develop a clearer understanding of the role of business education and business schools in fostering global mobility. As business schools seek to educate managers who can work globally and adjust to new business and cultural environments, it is important to assess which specific dimensions of business education, such as the location of the school and its curriculum, play a significant role in fostering greater global mobility among business graduates. This also helps how business schools potentially influence global talent flows.

This study uses an empirical research methodology in the form of a multivariate analysis to examine a sample of 91 business schools that are accredited by Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) in the 2015 Financial Times Global MBA Ranking.

This study finds that international mobility of MBA graduates is mediated both by the design of the curriculum and the location of the business school. MBA graduates from leading business schools that offer greater levels of international experiential learning are more likely to pursue overseas careers after graduation. MBA graduates from leading business schools that are located in economically globalized locations, by contrast, are often more likely to remain in the country where they studied after graduation to pursue local employment opportunities.

This paper contributes to the knowledge of how business education influences the international mobility of business graduates and how it influences global talent flows.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the transformation of the Global Mobility (GM) function within global organisations from a tactical/transactional into a strategic function to add value to the business and international assignees.

The method of research is an exploratory, qualitative study using an interpretivist paradigm. In total, 37 GM specialists working and living across Europe, America and Australasia were interviewed.

Administrative burden, organisational culture and structure, lack of alignment with the business and talent management and the lack of capabilities of the GM function and GM specialists inhibit the transformation from a tactical/transactional GM function into a Strategic GM (SGM) function.

Although this study included a variety of stakeholders of the GM function, it did not include line managers and senior executives. Therefore, future research should capture the views on the GM function of middle and top management of global organisations to provide a more comprehensive view on SGM.

The designed “Global Mobility Specialists Competencies” model presents the competencies GM specialists and functions need to develop to be able to fulfil the role of a business partner and to create a GM function that is agile, flexible and responsive to create sustainable value for the organisation.

This paper identified the characteristics of the roles of the GM function and GM specialists unravelling how these influence the transformation of the GM function into a strategic function.

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.

This paper aims to understand how these competencies gained will help human resource (HR) leaders become more strategic about when and how to use global mobility for talent development.

In this paper, the author defines the construct of cultural agility and describes the theoretical mechanisms through which employees can gain cultural agility through culturally novel situations such as global mobility. Cultural agility enables individuals to work comfortably and effectively with people from different cultures and in situations of cultural novelty. People with cultural agility have task-management competencies (cultural minimization, adaptation and integration), self-management competencies (tolerance of ambiguity, resilience, curiosity) and relationship-management competencies (humility, relationship building and perspective taking).

This study aims at focusing on the development of cultural agility, this paper focuses on four cascading features of a culturally novel experience that can help individuals gain this competence: (1) the level of cultural novelty in the experience, (2) the readiness of an individual for that level of cultural novelty, (3) the individual's level of awareness of the cultural norms and values inherent in the culturally novel experience and (4) the level of social support offered to that individual to learn how to understand and respond in that experience.

Each feature is discussed, concluding with the implications for future research and practitioners in global mobility and talent development.

This paper aims to examine how the globally mobile elite (GME) uses its capital and networks to create a perception that market-driven solutions to social problems are superior to the efforts of government and civil society.

Drawing on a number of emerging literatures, the authors introduce and develop the concept of the “perceived mobility of impact” and use the case of the “Bono effect” to illustrate how this phenomenon is enacted. The authors then employ a critical lens to challenge the consequences of this perceived mobility of impact.

Global elites use their mobility to generate network capital, which in conjunction with celebrity affinity for global humanitarian causes builds a self-reinforcing consensus and legitimizes market-driven solutions to social problems. While this approach may make the GME feel generous about their contribution, it raises questions about accountability and representation in shaping global social policy.

This paper contributes to the burgeoning literature on the GME, offering a unique critical perspective on their motives and actions, and introduces the concept of ‘perceived mobility of impact’.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced global organizations to adopt technology-driven virtual solutions involving faster, less costly and more effective ways to work worldwide even after the pandemic. One potential outcome may be through virtual global mobility (VGM), defined as the replacement of personal physical international interactions for work purposes with electronic personal online interactions. The purpose of this article is to establish VGM as a theoretical concept and explore to what extent it can replace or complement physical global work assignments.

This perspectives article first explores advantages and disadvantages of global virtual work and then discusses the implementation of VGM and analyses to what extent and how VGM can replace and complement physical global mobility.

Representing a change of trend, long-term corporate expatriates could become necessary core players in VGM activities while the increase of the number of global travelers may be halted or reversed. VGM activities will grow and further develop due to a continued rapid development of communication and coordination technologies. Consequently, VGM is here to stay!

The authors have witnessed a massive trend of increasing physical global mobility where individuals have crossed international borders to conduct work. The authors are now observing the emergence of a counter-trend: instead of moving people to their work the authors often see organizations moving work to people. This article has explored some of the advantages, disadvantages, facilitators and barriers of such global virtual work. Given the various purposes of global work the authors chart the suitability of VGM to fulfill these organizational objectives.

The purpose of this paper is to examine empirically whether teaching methodologies that emphasize international experiential learning have a significant role in fostering or encouraging greater international mobility. To that end, it assesses whether MBA programs that emphasize experience‐based learning in the form of international travel, exchanges and internships have more internationally mobile graduates than programs that do not. It also discusses the broader role of experiential learning in teaching students skills relevant to international business.

This study uses data from the Financial Times Global MBA Rankings and the A.T. Kearney/Foreign Policy Globalization Index to assess whether international experiential learning is conducive to the future international mobility of graduates. It employs a multivariate data analysis methodology to examine whether the international experience and exposure received during an MBA is a predictor of subsequent international mobility.

This study finds that MBA programs that use experiential teaching methods that emphasize international travel, exchanges and internships tend to have more internationally mobile graduates than those that do not, even after the influence of foreign students and location have been controlled for.

Relatively few studies have examined the question of whether the international experiential teaching methods that many MBA programs use, such as exchanges, internships and travel, have an impact on the subsequent international mobility of graduates. This is an important research area as many MBA programs have embraced experiential learning techniques as the centerpiece of their efforts to train more culturally sensitive, adaptable and internationally‐minded graduates to work both domestically and overseas.