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This study aims to contribute to the enrichment of the literature by examining the impact of cross-cultural training on expatriates’ adjustment of Nigerian bankers on expatriate assignments in other African countries.

Data on cross-cultural adjustment from expatriate employees in five banks that collectively accounted for over 80 per cent of Nigerian banks with subsidiaries in other African were systematically selected for the investigation. This data was collected quantitatively via a survey instrument. Independent sample t-test, analysis of variance (ANOVA) and regression analysis were deployed in analyzing the data.

The study found that cross-cultural adjustment varied significantly across the different categories of gender, age, marital status, previous expatriate training, previous expatriate experience, and duration of expatriation. The study concludes that in order to attain higher levels of adjustment African banks and other organizations should provide a more comprehensive cross-cultural training program that mirrors the needs of employees following a detailed needs analysis. Also, the training must be sequential and not a one-off approach.

The literature though still nascent is largely focused on expatriate preparation and adjustment for expatriates moving from Western-to-western contexts and very little exists in the literature on how multinationals from Non-Western contexts like Africa prepare their staff for expatriation and its consequent impact on their adjustment. This study aims to enrich the literature by examining the impact of cross-cultural training on expatriates’ adjustment of Nigerian bankers on expatriate assignments in other African countries.

The extant literature on expatriate adjustment primarily highlights the role of host country nationals (HCNs) in supporting expatriates during international assignments. However, there is a dearth of research exploring the expatriates’ socialization process in establishing interpersonal relationships with HCNs. Additionally, the pivotal element of expatriates seeking credible HCN sources, fundamental for fostering these relationships for adjustment, remains largely unexamined in the context of expatriate literature. Thus, this study addresses these gaps by proposing a conceptual model to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the expatriate adjustment process.

This conceptual paper draws upon the theoretical framework of social identity theory to elucidate how socialization processes initiated by the parent organization and the expatriate shape the expatriate’s perception of HCN credibility. This perception, in turn, serves as the foundation for building a robust support system, ultimately leading to expatriate adjustment.

The proposed model explores the nuanced dimensions of expatriate adjustment, emphasizing the complex dynamics between expatriates and host country nationals during individualized socialization. This model aims to assess the credibility of HCNs in the eyes of expatriates and understand the role of the institutionalized socialization process. Further, the model investigates the influence of perceived similarity traits in the examined relationship, shedding light on the interplay of these factors and their impact on the expatriate’s adjustment to the international assignment.

The study’s findings offer practical insights for organizations looking to enhance their support systems for expatriates, emphasizing the importance of nurturing interpersonal relationships and the credibility of HCNs.

This study contributes to the expatriate literature by shedding light on the often-overlooked interpersonal relationship between expatriates and HCNs. Doing so opens new avenues for further research, offering a fresh perspective on the expatriate adjustment process.

This paper aims to examine the learning gained from the evolving adjustment experiences of co-workers in moving to home-based working during the COVID-19 pandemic and the influence of these experiences on re-adjusting to return to co-working.

Results of a longitudinal qualitative study are reported where a group of co-workers were interviewed on three occasions between 2019 and 2022. Experiences are analysed alongside the adjustment to the remote work model using a boundary management lens.

The main adjustment experiences were in work location, temporal structures, professional and social interactions, and a new adjustment area was identified around family role commitment that emerged in the home-based setting. Boundary management practices were temporal, behavioural, spatial and object-related and evolved with the unfolding of adjustment experiences. A return to using co-working spaces was driven by the need for social interaction and spatial boundaries but affected by the requirement for increased privacy.

This paper will help workplace managers to understand adjustment experiences and develop facilities that will support a positive shared working environment not fulfilled through home-based working.

Although many workers abruptly transitioned to home-based working during the pandemic, this research considers those who would normally choose to work in a community-centred working environment rather than being home-based. As such, their experience of adjustment is of greater interest, particularly in terms of their expectations for shared working spaces.

Building upon the framework of the tradeoff model of capital structure and motivated by the equity market timing theory, we examine whether equity misvaluation is a source of adjustment “costs” that will affect a firm’s leverage adjustment speed toward target. We also investigate whether the quality of a firm’s long-term growth options will influence the decisions of managers to exploit the mispriced equity to converge to the optimum. Using a sample of listed Taiwanese firms during 1992–2014 and employing the market-to-book decomposition as developed by Rhodes-Kropf, Robinson, and Viswanathan (2005), we find that overleveraged and overvalued firms demonstrate faster adjustment speed than overleveraged but undervalued firms. Furthermore, controlling for the misvaluation status, high-growth firms converge to target faster than their low-growth counterparts. The effect of growth options on the relation between equity mispricing and adjustment speed does not mirror the effect of financing deficits. With the detailed financial information of the local companies across a rather long time series, this study provides incremental inputs to the literature of capital structure from the determinants of target leverage, the estimation of leverage adjustment speeds, to the identification of the sources of adjustment costs in an emerging market where institutional environment is strikingly different from the US.

This paper reports on findings from an ethnographic study of international student adjustment. The paper recommends the use of ethnography as a way to research the experiences of tourists and migrants to build up a body of knowledge on the outcome of cross-cultural contact for these two groups. The aim of my ethnographic study was to capture the adjustment journey of a group of international postgraduate students at a university in the South of England. The ethnographic approach involved regular in-depth individual interviews with 13 students of different nationalities and overt participant observation of the entire postgraduate cohort of 150 students. Research began on the first day of induction in September 2003 and ended upon completion and submission of the Masters dissertation in October 2004. Students' experience of adjustment to academic and socio-cultural life was therefore captured from arrival in the new country to the return home one full year later. This study finds that stress was at its height in the initial stage of the academic sojourn; the struggle to cope with the challenges of foreign language use and an unfamiliar academic and the socio-cultural environment at a time when students were beset with homesickness and loneliness are the causes of this stress. An association was made between the passage of time and a gradual decrease in acculturative stress; however, this was not a generalisable process; there was fluctuation not only in experience across the student body but also in the individual's subjective sense of success across different aspects of life in the new country. This led to the conceptualisation of the adjustment journey as an unpredictable and dynamic process that is experienced differently among sojourners and fluctuates throughout the sojourn as a result of a host of individual, cultural and external factors. The relevance of this study to tourism scholars comes from drawing parallels between the long-stay tourist and the international student who represents an important segment of international travel. However, a gap in the literature exists on the impact of tourism on the tourist that this study helps to fill.

We review 25 years of research on expatriate experiences concentrating on expatriate adjustment as a central construct, and relying on a general stressor-stress-strain framework. First, we consider who expatriates are, why their experiences differ from domestic employees, and what adjustment is. Conceptualizing (mal)adjustment in terms of stress, we next review the stressors and strains associated with it. Consolidating the wide range of antecedents (anticipatory and in-country) that have been studied to date, we note major patterns of effects and their implications for how HR managers can facilitate adjustment. Although relatively less research has focused on the consequences of adjustment, enough evidence exists to establish a bottom-line impact of poor adjustment on performance. To stimulate future efforts to understand the experiences of expatriates, we discuss the challenges and opportunities of continuing down this road of research.

The repatriation process often involves challenging and unexpected readjustment issues, leading to high turnover amongst repatriates. However, research has focussed on the re-entry decisions and experiences of company-assigned (CA) repatriates, whilst studies on self-initiated expatriates (SIEs) that repatriate back to their home countries (i.e. self-initiated repatriates (SIRs)) are limited, particularly in emerging transition economies. This study develops and tests a model to explain the factors influencing professional SIRs' turnover intentions and how repatriation readjustment affects their intentions in Vietnam.

The data was collected from 445 Vietnamese professional SIRs who worked and/or studied for extended periods overseas and subsequently returned to Vietnam. Structural equation modelling (SEM) was used to analyse the data.

Results indicate that both work and life repatriation adjustment difficulties have significant positive effects on turnover intentions, whilst only repatriation life adjustment difficulties have an indirect effect via life dissatisfaction. Further, cultural distance positively influences repatriation adjustment difficulties and turnover intentions. SIRs' on-the-job and off-the-job embeddedness negatively moderate the influence of repatriation work and life adjustment difficulties on turnover intentions, respectively.

The study develops a theoretical model explaining how repatriation difficulties impact the turnover intentions of SIRs, considering contextual factors including cultural distance and embeddedness. The research highlights the importance of job embeddedness as a form of social and organisational support for SIRs in managing psychological challenges related to repatriation, which can help reduce turnover and retain highly skilled talent. Additionally, the study extends repatriation research on an under-researched subgroup of SIEs, SIRs, in an under-researched emerging transition economy context.

On the basis of labor economics theories, this study examines how adjustment in human capital accounts for labor cost stickiness.

This study makes use of employee education level as a measure of the quality of human capital and relies on data from Chinese public firms to conduct the empirical test. This study focuses on two important components of labor cost changes: one corresponding to the adjustment in the number of employees (capacity adjustment) and another corresponding to the adjustment in the mix of employee education levels (quality adjustment).

This study reveals that labor cost changes driven by the adjustment of employee education level are sticky. This stickiness cannot be explained by the standard adjustment cost theory. This further shows that firms that actively adjust their employee quality during downturns experience improved future performance. The findings are robust to alternative measures and specifications.

This study provides new evidence for and insights into the cost behavior literature. Previous studies treat input resources in a homogenous way and focus on the effect of capacity adjustment. This study considers the heterogeneity of resources and examines three dimensions of salary cost adjustment: capacity, structure, and unit cost. In line with the economic theory of sticky costs proposed by Banker et al. (2013a), the study’s evidence sheds light on the additional underlying economic mechanisms driving cost stickiness behavior. Specifically, managers asymmetrically adjust both employee structure and average salaries, in addition to employee number. This study also adds to the existing knowledge of the consequences of managers' actions regarding cost behavior.