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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.

Companies target globally mobile workers and face the war for talent, while individuals are more reluctant to engage in global mobility. This scenario led us to propose a model to understand the individuals' decision process to engage in global mobility.

Building on the self-determination theory, the theory of planned behavior and the literature on decisions for global mobility, the authors propose mechanisms through which psychological variables and assignments' factual and perceived contextual aspects (directly or indirectly) explain the decision to engage or not in global mobility.

This study offers a conceptual model with the authors' novel propositions to explain individuals' decision to engage in global mobility.

The model provides a more comprehensive explanation of the individuals' decision-making process to engage in global mobility than previous models and potentially yields more effective organizational practices to attract both well-established and emerging phenomena of globally mobile workers.

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.

Internationalisation and academic mobility have long been integral parts, although serving different purposes in the higher education industry. Internationalisation has played a crucial role in facilitating academic exchange, knowledge sharing, research partnerships and collaborative innovation. However, the rise of neoliberalism has introduced the market forces of global capitalism that have significantly impacted higher education worldwide – invading the sector with neoliberal market values. This chapter aims to explore the impact of neoliberalism on the internationalisation of higher education in Africa, with a specific focus on trends in international student mobility. The chapter argues that the influence of neoliberalism on international mobility extends beyond market dynamics, encompassing discussions on hegemony within international knowledge systems, where African countries and institutions often find themselves marginalised. The study relies on published materials and publicly available statistical data from both governmental and non-governmental organisations. By examining the interplay between neoliberalism and the process of internationalisation in higher education, this chapter sheds light on the intricate and multifaceted aspects of both concepts, as well as their practical implications for international student mobility. Moreover, the chapter reflects on the implications of neoliberal entanglements for the prospects of internationalisation in African higher education.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive framework that identifies thematic clusters and their interconnections within Global Talent Management (GTM), global careers and talent management (TM).

In this paper, this study conducted a co-citation analysis using bibliographic data to unveil the intellectual connections and relationships among thematic articles related to GTM sourced from the Web of Science.

This review highlights three key research themes: experiences working abroad, TM approaches and the complex nature of GTM as a living system.

The main limitation of this research is the sample itself. Content analysis based on the co-citation method resulted in some more recent releases being omitted.

The practical implications of the paper include providing a structured framework for understanding the complexities of GTM.

Research into the academic literature in this area is divided into various clusters, empirically demonstrating how GTM and global mobility are intertwined, revealing the need for us to more thoroughly comprehend the social ramifications of GTM practices and activities and the need to further analyse the influencing social aspects in a GTM strategy, like diversity, increased mobility and virtual reality.

The analysis revealed the emergence of three distinct thematic groups: (1) global work experiences, (2) TM approaches and (3) GTM.

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.