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The purpose of this paper is to develop a theoretical model describing how immigrant employees’ organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) are influenced by their immigrant status. Additionally, this study attempts to explore the mediating role of perceived job mobility as well as the moderating role of organizational tenure in the relationship between immigrant status and OCBs.

A conceptual analysis was performed.

Drawing upon social identity, self-categorization, and impression management theories, this study proposes the following. First, an immigrant employee’s perceived different categorization of employment and organizational status will have a negative impact on his or her challenge-oriented OCB. Second, an immigrant employee’s perceived categorization of employment and organizational status will have a positive impact on his or her affiliation-oriented OCB. Third, perceived job mobility mediates the relationship between the perceived different categorization of employment and organizational status and challenge- and affiliation-oriented OCBs of an immigrant employee. Finally, an immigrant employee’s organizational tenure weakens (or strengthens) the negative (or positive) impact of immigrant status on challenge-oriented (or affiliation-oriented) OCB.

From a theoretical standpoint, this study provides a novel theoretical base that guides future research on immigrant employees’ OCBs in organizations. More importantly, this study offers recommendations that help maximize the effectiveness of immigrant employee’s OCBs.

Immigrants are important contributors to workplaces, but HRM scholars have only recently begun to study them systematically. We document the prevalence and cross-national variation in populations of immigrant employees. Going beyond a treatment that considers them as another element of diversity, we propose how gradients of status at each level of country, organization, and work group admittance can result in unique outcomes for immigrants who are equally (dis)similar. We offer a taxonomy of immigrant pathways into their destination countries to explore the status hierarchies they are assigned by governments and reinforced by organizations. We provide insights into the ascribed status of immigrants and develop a typology of individual and organizational acculturation strategies based on the cultural tightness and looseness of the destination and origin cultures. We then describe how the reactions of members of an immigrant employee’s social environment are sensitive to ascribed status and cultural tightness-looseness. We do so in a three-stage process that begins with immigrant categorization, followed by conferral of (il)legitimacy, and finally brought together with perceptions of outcome interdependence. Finally, we offer ideas about HRM interventions to guide management scholars in their quest for understanding and improve the experiences of immigrants in the workplace.

Though a number of demographics (e.g. sex, age) have been associated with work overload, scholars have yet to consider the potential impact of immigrant status. This is important because immigrants constitute a significant proportion of the workforce, and evidence suggests many employers believe they are easier to exploit. This paper aims to examine work hours, interpersonal justice, and immigrant status as predictors of work overload.

The hypotheses were tested using a large, national random telephone survey of employees in the United States (n=2,757).

As expected, employees who worked more hours tended to perceive more work overload. Importantly, however, this effect interacted with interpersonal justice differently for immigrant and native‐born employees. Justice attenuated the effect of work hours for the former but seemed to exacerbate it somewhat for the latter. Of note, the interactive effect was more than five times larger for immigrants than for natives.

The study shows that supervisors might require their employees to work longer hours without necessarily being perceived as abusive (i.e. overloading them). Doing so, however, requires treating employees justly in the form of respect, courtesy, and dignity. Though this form of just treatment is important for all employees, its effects are especially pronounced for immigrants.

The relationship between the number of hours worked and perceptions of work overload is examined for immigrant and non‐immigrant workers in the USA.

This conceptual paper starts from the recognition that internationalisation of business is an information‐intensive process and aims to investigate two key modes for the acquisition of knowledge: expatriates and immigrant employees.

The paper sets out a conceptual framework which examines nine popular modes of knowledge acquisition essential to the internationalisation process and their comparative strengths and weaknesses. This is coupled with a more intensive evaluation of the relative merits of the two strategies of expatriates and immigrant employees.

The analysis suggests that the modes of expatriates and immigrant employees can both be cost effective and yield high levels of relevant knowledge underpinning internationalisation. However, there are key differences between the two and it may be more useful to consider them as complements rather than simply substitutes. The strength of expatriates is their considerable knowledge of the home market, industry and firm. Their weakness is the need to gradually acquire overseas market knowledge. The strength of immigrant employees is their knowledge of overseas target markets. Their weaknesses are limited understanding of the home country business system, the firm and even the industry.

The paper has several limitations. It is conceptual in nature and tentative in assessment. It does not consider all available knowledge gathering modes. To fully understand this process more research is required, particularly work that extends the narrow case approach typically used.

The analysis suggests that different information gathering modes offer different advantages with none clearly superior in all situations. A similar situation appears to also hold for the modes of expatriates and immigrant employees and the two modes may be more usefully considered as complements.

The key contribution of the paper is in evaluating these two modes from the perspective of market knowledge and diffusion.

The increasing number of Hispanic immigrant employee workers in the hospitality industry in the USA has led to some imperative issues and questions, such as how communication barriers and culture gaps influence work injuries. The purpose of this study is to examine factors that influence the extent to which immigrant employees report work injuries to their managers.

Using survey methodology, 154 full‐time employees working at a hospitality operation were requested to participate (60 percent were Hispanic immigrant employees, 40 percent were US born). Participants were given a Spanish or English language survey that contained the measures of interests, as well as demographic questions, and a debriefing statement.

The results showed that immigrant workers reported fewer injuries to their supervisors/managers than US‐born workers and the extent to which Hispanic immigrants speak English was related to the frequency of reporting work injuries. Immigrant climate moderated the relationship between Hispanic immigrant workers' English fluency and the frequency of reporting work injuries. The effect of English fluency was more pronounced for a negative climate work environment than a positive climate work environment.

This study provides support for the view that limited English fluency has a negative influence on Hispanic immigrant workers' reporting of injuries in the workplace.

The current research shows that language barriers can be a possible explanation as to why immigrant workers report fewer work injuries to management than US‐born workers. Both English fluency and immigrant climate influenced the extent to which Hispanic immigrant employees reported injuries to management.

This study is an inductive exploration of factors that are relevant to the inclusion and integration of immigrant workers in a Swedish workplace. The purpose of this paper is to examine the experiences of immigrant employees with other organisational actors at two senior nursing units in Sweden.

Results are drawn from the analyses of interviews with six female and three male immigrant nursing assistants living permanently in Sweden.

Trustful relationships with other organisational actors, during both formal and informal interactions, are considered essential facilitating inclusion of these immigrant workers. Immigrant workers experienced inclusion when they achieved language competence (or felt supported in their attempts to do so) and bridged cultural differences. The results also highlight conditions for interactions and leadership as factors influencing inclusion. In addition, inclusion implied acculturation or awareness of the values of native-born citizens.

The study suggests that immigrants’ relational dynamics with their colleagues are essential to inclusion, despite types of studies that focus mainly on the competences of leaders to manage diversity.

The results have implications for organisations’ development of a more democratic workplace with more inclusiveness and with satisfied employees.

The study gives voice to immigrant workers, which is rare in Swedish and international organisations that deal with the issue of immigrant integration in the workplace.

The continuance of gender inequity has dominated most of the discourse on diversity in organisations. Few studies, particularly in the Australian context, deal with the racialised nature of many professional workplaces. This chapter critically examines immigrant Indian professionals’ experiences of perceived discrimination, exclusion after inclusion, and bias in Australian organisations. It focuses on the complexities of emotional labour, since concealing true emotions and displaying the emotions necessitated by the job can be difficult. Job burnout and stress are possible outcomes of this conflict between required and true emotions. There is a rapidly growing Indian community in Australia. In 2020, there were over 7.6 million migrants living in Australia. This was 29.8 percent of the population that were born overseas. One year earlier, in 2019, there were 7.5 million people born overseas. Those born in India (721,000) were in second place, with an increase of 56,300 people (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2020a). This chapter examines the challenges and adjustments experienced by immigrant Indian professionals, as well as whether these factors play a role in their workplace integration.

The aim of this study is to investigate why many immigrants end up in uncertain employment.

The paper describes a qualitative case study of three nursing homes in Oslo (Norway), which investigates immigrant employment and recruitment-related practices. Practice theory is used as the theoretical and methodological framework. The study takes an ethnographic approach and combines participant observation, semi-structured shadowing, qualitative interviews and document review.

The recruitment practice, as it is accomplished, is different from the practice that is prescribed in the formal recruitment policy. The configuration of the recruitment-related practices locks in the recruitment practice and reproduces the social order. The net effect of the recruitment-related practices is that immigrant employees remain in uncertain employment.

A practice-theoretical approach, analyzing organizational practices as they are accomplished in space and time and not as isolated activities defined by their purpose, provides a richer understanding of the complexity and connectedness of organizational practices. Combining practice theory and institutional perspectives, the paper demonstrates how normative and regulative mediators order and align related practices. The study demonstrates the importance of examining the configuration of practices to understand how the net effect of related practices affects those who dwell in them, in this case immigrants pursuing secure and stable employment.

This study contributes to the field of diversity management by using practice theory to explain why measures for enhancing immigrant employment may not have the intended effect because they are interwoven in a nexus of practices with conflicting interests that (un)intentionally undermine the measures.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether immigrants, when in the minority, are more exposed to bullying at work than natives, and whether immigrants’ cultural distance from the host culture increases the risk of being bullied.

The study was conducted as a cross-sectional survey. The participants were immigrant (N=183) and native (N=186) employees in a transport company in Finland.

Whereas immigrants on average were more likely than natives to label themselves as being bullied, the culturally least distant group of immigrants did not differ in this regard from natives. Compared to natives, the risk of being bullied was nearly three times higher in the intermediate distance group of immigrants and nearly eight times higher in the culturally most distant group. The primary type of negative act immigrants were subjected to was social exclusion.

It would be advisable for future research investigating immigrants’ exposure to bullying to use quasi-objective measures along with a self-labelling measure, and to apply qualitative methods.

The heightened risk of culturally distant immigrants to being exposed to bullying might be reduced by improving employees’ cross-cultural communication skills and by promoting an atmosphere of acceptance of cultural diversity.

The study is an addition to the still scarce literature on immigrants’ exposure to workplace bullying, and takes into particular account immigrants’ cultural distance from their host culture.

The occupational stress is a disadvantage resulting in mental health illnesses that have been found when looking at those migrants who were young adults and migrated to work in the urban areas, leaving behind their aging parents to live alone at home. The purpose of this paper is to compare the causal relationships of job stress between Thai immigrant employees with and without rearing aging parents.

The research was a cross-sectional survey. The sample for this study included 600 Thai immigrant employees (300 cases per group) in 2016. Measures included individual characteristics, working conditions, and a Thai Job Content Questionnaire (Thai-JCQ) on related job stress. The model was verified using a path model by Mplus software.

The distance traveled between the house and the workplace, wages, working conditions had a direct effect on job stress. Working conditions among Thai immigrants employees with rearing aging parents had the most direct effect on job stress with a standardized regression weight of 0.552 (p-value <0.05) as well as working conditions among their without rearing aging parents had the most direct effect on job stress with a standardized regression weight of −0.292.

This research demonstrated that working conditions were an important factor.