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The purpose of this study is to assess differences between the adjustment of expatriates in Germany and France. Most research has focused on the individual in relation to expatriate adjustment. The general conditions of the host country, however, could represent an important contextual factor that needs to be explored further.

Based on an empirical study of 130 expatriate managers on foreign assignments in France (61) and Germany (69), the authors take a comparative perspective and examine differences for sociocultural and psychological adjustment as well as time to proficiency in both countries.

The authors found that expatriates assigned to France show higher degrees of work adjustment and general adjustment than those in Germany. This was unexpected as Germany is generally described as a more transparent, open and welcoming country. Results may thus challenge stereotypical conceptions of national differences and indicate that globalization processes are gradually changing country-specific conditions.

Only scant research has dealt with expatriates adjusting to Western European countries and no other studies have compared the adjustment of expatriates in Germany and France.

Despite over 50 years of expatriation research, the implications of expatriation for identity remains an under-researched topic in mainstream international human resource management (IHRM) literature. Expatriation can cause disruption to expatriates' familiar sociocultural environment, which can often pose challenges to their self-concept and identity. The study underpinned by identity and social identity theories explores the perceptions of Spanish self-initiated expatriate (SIE) nurses living in Germany and other Spanish nurses who repatriated from Germany to understand the influence of expatriation on their self-concept and identity.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with Spanish SIE nurses in Germany (n = 20) and others who had repatriated from Germany (n = 10). Data analysis was assisted by NVivo software.

The study identified that low proficiency in the host country language (HCL) and the problematic workplace interactions that ensued, challenged the participants' self-conceptions as competent professionals and prompted their reliance on social networks of fellow Spaniards for social validation.

Although focused on a specific context, the study not only enhances practical understanding of Spanish SIE nurses in Germany but also offers valuable insights to organisations working with SIEs. It adds to extant knowledge on language and identity in the expatriation context and discusses the implications for global HRM related to underutilisation of SIEs' knowledge and skills within organisations.

The study contributes to theory building on the under-researched link between expatriation and identity, while adding to the growing literature on SIEs.

The literature on business expatriates has been increasing rapidly, but research on expatriate academics has remained scant, despite the apparent increasing globalisation of the academic world. Therefore, more research is needed on the latter group of expatriates. This paper aims to fill some of the gaps.

A questionnaire was directed electronically towards expatriate academics occupying regular positions in science faculty departments in universities in northern Europe.

Results showed that job clarity was the dominating job factor with strong relationships with all of the five investigated work outcome variables, work adjustment, work performance, work effectiveness, job satisfaction, and time to proficiency. Job conflict and job freedom had an association with some of the work outcome variables but not with all of them. Neither workload nor job novelty had a relationship with any of the work outcome variables of the expatriate academics.

The paper shows that the findings are only partly consistent with previous research results concerning business expatriates, suggesting that the work situation for expatriate academics could have both similarities and discrepancies as compared to that of business expatriates.

While there is a growing interest in expatriate academics, their specific role as teachers with daily contact to local students seems to have been largely ignored when examining their adjustment and work outcomes. Based on the job demands-resources model the authors predict that good teacher-student relations, as a supportive job resource, will have a positive effect on expatriate academics’ job satisfaction. This effect, however, will be even stronger for individuals experiencing high job demands and challenges in terms of intercultural job adjustment. In other words, expatriate academics that have difficulties adjusting will benefit more from the social support that can originate from good relations to their students. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The authors surveyed expatriate academics adjusting to a university position in China by use of 124 responses from foreign university employees.

The authors found that teacher-student relations had a positive association with job satisfaction and that positive teacher-student relations increased job satisfaction more for individuals being slow to adjust.

This is one of the few papers to explore the impact that students can have on expatriate academics and treat this relationship as a potential resource for universities to capitalize upon in socializing their new foreign academic staff members.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the direct impact of individual variables (cultural openness, social orientation, willingness to communicate, confidence in own technical abilities, active stress resistance, prior international experience) on expatriate time to proficiency (TTP); and the moderating effects of the home country on the relationships between these individual variables and expatriate TTP.

The authors use a quantitative, self-administered questionnaire to gather data from assigned expatriates from different countries in India, analysed through partial least squares.

The findings show that, first, four individual variables, i.e. social orientation, willingness to communicate, confidence in technical abilities and active stress resistance reduce expatriate TTP in the global sample. Second, the individual antecedents of expatriate TTP vary significantly across home countries.

The results confirm the importance of individual antecedents in explaining expatriate TTP and the importance of context in the study of expatriates’ cross-cultural effectiveness. The authors also propose new, shorter measures for the individual antecedents.

The practical implications for HRM professionals relate mainly to selection and cross-cultural training. Expatriates may also get a better understanding of the individual and contextual variables that impact their TTP.

The authors show that individual antecedents interact with context, here home country, to predict expatriate TTP in an under-researched host country, India.

Job engagement has attracted much attention recently. However, very little research distinguishes between how the context may affect different engagement dimensions differently. Based on a theory of resource exhaustion, the purpose of this paper is to focus on a cognitively demanding work context in order to explore variations in effect of different engagement dimension and different expatriate work outcomes.

The authors use survey results from 102 expatriate academics in Singapore to study the relations between job engagement and expatriate work outcomes. Contrary to most studies, the authors examine physical, emotional, and cognitive engagement separately.

The authors found that for expatriate academics, the different dimensions of job engagement have different relationships with work outcomes such that physical engagement and emotional engagement are positively associated with various work outcomes while cognitive engagement is negatively related or not associated at all with the same work outcomes. The authors explain the variation in results by drawing on recent developments in social cognitive neuroscience.

This is one of the first empirical studies to examine job engagement in an international setting and the application of a social cognitive neuroscience provides a novel perspective. An engagement theory of resource exhaustion could enhance theory building as well as facilitate the understanding of the association between job engagement and work outcomes in varying contexts.

Drawing on socio-cognitively orientated leadership studies, this paper aims to contribute to our understanding of host country employees’ (HCEs) negative perceptions of successive expatriate leadership by exploring how their memories of shared past experiences affect these perceptions. Contrary to previous work which tends to focus on HCEs’ attitudes towards individual expatriates, the authors shift attention to successive executive expatriate assignments within a single subsidiary.

The paper is based on an intrinsic case study carried out in a Polish subsidiary of an American multinational pharmaceutical company which had been managed by four successive expatriate General Managers and one local executive. The authors draw on interview data with 40 HCEs. Twenty-one semi-structured interviews were conducted with staff who had been managed by at least three of the subsidiary’s expatriate leaders.

The authors demonstrate how transference triggered by past experiences with expatriate leaders as well as HCEs’ implicit leadership theories affect HCEs’ negative perceptions of expatriate leadership and lead to the emergence of expatriate leadership schema.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that explores the role of transference and implicit leadership theories in HCEs’ perceptions of successive executive expatriate assignments. By focussing on retrospective accounts of HCEs who had been managed by a series of successive expatriate leaders, our study has generated a more nuanced and contextualised understanding of the role of HCEs’ shared past experiences in shaping their perceptions of expatriate leadership. The authors propose a new concept – expatriate leadership schema – which describes HCEs’ cognitive structures, developed during past experiences with successive expatriate leaders, which specify what HCEs believe expatriate leadership to look like and what they expect from it.

The purpose of this paper was to test the mediating role of training duration in relationship between firm characteristics and training evaluation practices. In this paper, the authors also investigated if this mediating effect differs with respect to the size of the firm.

The authors collected data from 260 professionals of 90 call centers.

The authors found that training duration mediates the relationship between firm size and training evaluation. The authors also found that indirect effect of firm size on training evaluation through training duration differs across different levels of firm size but not across different levels of ownership.

This is a cross-sectional study that emphasized on training evaluation practices only.

The study has implication for both evaluation researchers and practitioners in terms of designing training evaluation policies and practices.

This is the first study in its nature that explains the intervening role of training duration in relationship of firm characteristics and training evaluation practices.

The main objective of this paper is twofold: to analyse the progress of a research stream concerning expatriate academics in the last four decades and to make recommendations for further studies in this field.

In this study, the systematic literature review (SLR) concerning expatriate academics was applied. The search embraced the period from 1980–2022. The review was performed in two interdisciplinary electronic databases: Web of Science and Scopus. The selection process of papers was conducted in steps, as recommended by the PRISMA protocol. The total pool of articles received after the exclusion criteria was 110. The content of each paper was thus extracted and categorised in Excel file: author, year of publication, tittle of article, journal, theory applied, research method, sample size, country/field of investigation.

For almost three decades this topic was almost absent in the literature of the subject. The most active publication period started from 2009 and since then there have been two “waves” of published articles devoted to expatriate academics: 2009–2014 and 2017–2021. The significant number of studies appeared in Journal of Global Mobility followed by Personnel Review, IJHRM, Higher Education. The thematic analysis revealed six themes which have been already researched on expatriates academics: (1) motives, (2) adjustment, (3) job factors and work outcomes, (4) academic missions, (5) academic career, (6) women and men in academia.

Practitioners and university management might find this article useful as the article allows to manage this pool of international academics more efficiently with mutual benefits for expatriates and organisations. This study may assist the university authorities to develop systemic approach to attract foreign academics; adjust the same in work and culture domain through effective training; support in organisational, financial and career field; create the performance criteria of expatriate work related to three missions: research, teaching and service; introduce metrics and indicators to evaluate the contribution and work outcomes of foreign scientists into the host university.

This review shows that there are many new perspectives and models through which the academic expatriation can be analysed. This paper gives an insight into the academic literature on academics expatriates. The paper is innovative and has contributed to research by doing an SLR in a new area (academic expats) and tackling all the areas that has been covered by academic research so far. New research directions have been recommended for future research, to open the field further.

The prevention through design (PtD) initiative places a duty on designers to originate designs that are inherently safe for construction, maintenance, occupation and demolition. In the UK, legislation has been introduced creating a new statutory role called the principal designer (PD) to ensure that PtD occurs during the design process. To realize this objective, PDs under the regulations must have appropriate skills, knowledge and experience (SKE) of occupational safety and health risks as they relate to construction products. However, there is a paucity of knowledge, in the extant literature and in practice, regarding what specifically constitutes PDs’ SKE of PtD and how to measure the same.

The study undertook a systematic review of meanings of SKE and carried out content analyses to provide robust conceptualizations of the constructs SKE. This underpinned the development of nomological networks to operationalize the constructs SKE in respect of PDs’ ability to ensure PtD.

PDs’ SKE of PtD are presented as multidimensional constructs that can be operationalized at different levels of specificity in three theoretical models.

The models indicated in this study can assist project clients to clarify the PtD SKE of prospective PDs in the procurement process. Correspondingly, PDs can look to these frameworks to identify their SKE gaps and take steps to address them.

This study contributes to the PtD literature by providing theoretical frameworks to clarify the PtD SKE of PDs. The study provides a basis for future research to empirically test the attributes of these as they relate to PDs’ competence to ensure PtD.