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The purpose of this paper is to emphasize the role of talent management (TM) in strategic renewal. Furthermore, the authors extend the existing knowledge on the process of TM implementation by underlining particular activities, which are involved in this process during strategic renewal.

The authors report a qualitative study of a TM program in a Finnish–Swedish Multinational corporation undergoing major strategic renewal. The data consist of 46 semi-structured interviews and secondary data.

The role of TM in the context of strategic renewal is to provide the conditions for the self-initiation and identification of potential change agents and for the development of the talented employees to perform in their roles of change agent. In the context of strategic renewal, TM process consists of identification of key projects to address critical business opportunities and challenges, the identification of talented employees to execute them, and the identification and creation of key positions.

The authors encourage scholars to explore the empirical settings characterized by change and unpredictability in more detail, and thus examine the role of talented employees and TM in other specific contexts. Future studies are also encouraged to study other cultural settings and examine to what degree the process of TM implementation may positively influence attitudes and behaviors of talented employees and, consequently, the overall organizational performance.

This study offers practical advice for top management and HR managers. First, the process of TM implementation during strategic renewal should start with the identification of “must-win-battles” that can have a more profound impact on change. Furthermore, top management should allow and enable motivated potential talented employees to volunteer for the job of aiding company-wide changes. Next, top management should provide the talented employees with the space to come up with novel ideas and conceive new business opportunities. Finally, the importance of transparent and spot-on evaluation criteria should be emphasized.

The study contributes to advancing our understanding of TM and strategic management in practice.

Scholars have argued that different forms of proactive behaviors (e.g., career initiative, feedback seeking, and taking charge) all involve employees’ self-initiated and future-focused efforts to bring about change in a situation (Parker et al., 2006). There are at least three important elements that define proactivity: future-focus, change-orientation, and self-initiation (Frese & Fay, 2001; Parker et al., 2006). First, proactive behavior is future-focused, which means that this action is targeted at anticipated problems or at opportunities with a long-term focus. Second, proactive behavior is change-oriented, involving not just reacting to a situation but being prepared to change that situation in order to bring about a different future. Third, and underpinning the prior two elements, proactive behavior is self-initiated, which means that employees initiate a proactive goal without being told to, or without requiring explicit instructions from supervisors. Accordingly, proactivity has also been conceived of as a process in which employees generate and implement, under their own direction, a proactive goal to bring about a different future (Bindl, Parker, Totterdell, & Hagger-Johnson, 2012; Frese & Fay, 2001; Grant & Ashford, 2008).

Employee well-being has been an under-researched area in the field of human resources (HR) and organizational behavior. The purpose of this paper is to investigate personal (learning goal orientation (LGO)), contextual (empowering leadership), and job-related (psychological empowerment) antecedents of psychological well-being (PWB).

Individual perceptions of knowledge workers in nine Korean consulting firms in South Korea were obtained using a cross-sectional survey. HR managers distributed paper versions of a survey questionnaire to 400 employees, and 334 usable questionnaires were collected, giving the authors a final response rate of 83.5 percent.

As a result of structural equation modeling analysis, the level of employees’ psychological empowerment turned out to partially mediate the relationship between LGO and PWB, while fully mediating the relationship between empowering leadership and PWB. LGO and perceived empowering leadership accounted for 54 percent of the variance in psychological empowerment and the three antecedents explained 47 percent of the variance in PWB.

This study relied on a cross-sectional survey method with potential common method bias. As a result of the single-factor test, however, it is unlikely to confound the interpretations of the results. Another limitation of this study is that the sample of this study was restricted to knowledge workers with relatively high cognitive ability since they were mostly junior male managers with four-year college or graduate degrees.

To enhance perceived empowerment and PWB, HR, and OD practitioners can support employees and their managers by providing relevant HR practices and services including developing supportive empowering leaders with effective coaching skills, hiring, and developing employees with higher LGO, and redesigning jobs for employees so they feel more empowered.

This study linked four emerging subjects in management and positive psychology: goal orientation, empowering leadership, psychological empowerment, and well-being research. The theoretical contribution of this study lies in that it is one of the first attempts to investigate the relationships among LGO, psychological empowerment, and PWB specifically for knowledge workers in South Korea.

The purpose of this study is to examine the role of organisational conditions and workplace characteristics in midcareer and senior employees’ intention to volitionally provide career support to junior organisational members, their protégés.

Hypotheses are tested using multilevel linear modelling on a heterogeneous sample of Dutch employees ages 29 to 69 who participated in a vignette study in the autumn of 2017.

In line with the hypotheses, the findings of this study show that volitional (informal) mentoring is positively related to an organisation’s endorsement of intrinsic values (e.g. learning opportunities) and negatively to the presence of hindrance demands (e.g. time pressure).

Practitioners could facilitate co-mentor consultation, employ autonomy-supportive direct supervisors and fulfil psychological contract obligations by providing job security and learning opportunities. Organisations could also lower time pressures through job carving.

This study extends extant mentoring research by combining insights from perceived organisational support (POS) and self-determination theory (SDT) to examine the role organisational conditions and workplace characteristics play in aiding or hindering volitional mentoring. It enriches extant knowledge management studies on the link between organisational aspects and (intended) knowledge sharing behaviour by showing that similar organisational motivators predict volitional mentoring, thereby launching a call to study knowledge management through volitional mentoring using a SDT- and POS-based lens. A methodological novelty is the reliance on a vignette study.

In this chapter, the authors examined expatriates that self-initiate their international work for personal reasons and the factors that affect their departure from an organization. The authors conducted a systematic review of self-initiated expatriation (SIE) and its definitions in order to propose an integrated definition of SIE and model its nomological network. In addition, the authors construct a roadmap for future research directions in the SIE domain. Finally, using a qualitative research design, the authors studied the organizational practices designed to reduce SIE turnover in an exemplary multinational organization. Overall, our contributions are enhanced clarity of the SIE construct and the theorized practice of SIE retention.

The literature on marriage formation neglects different pathways to marriage. This study focuses on arranged marriage, introduced marriage, and self-initiated marriage as three main marriage pathways in East Asia and examines how people’s marriage pathway choices are associated with education and change over time in mainland China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Using data from the East Asian Social Survey, this study finds that education is associated with fewer arranged marriages and more self-initiated marriages and that more recent marriage cohorts also witness a decline in arranged marriages and an increase in self-initiated marriages. However, how introduced marriage is associated with education and change over time varies in four East Asian societies. The findings support the “developmentalism-marriage” framework that developmental idealism leads to modern marital practices.

Within the current discourse on contemporary careers and the context of international assignments, this paper seeks to conduct a study of a large European MNC, with the aim of theory development on expatriation/repatriation.

A qualitative study, based on semi‐structured interviews in a major financial institution.

Motivation to expatriate falls into two distinct categories – company initiated assignments; and self‐initiated, career orientated and/or self‐development focused. The authors propose a two dimensional model to depict the emergence of a new expatriation path alongside the traditional one – differentiating those who respond to an international assignment call within a clearly framed career development path; and those embarking on international assignment as, primarily, a personal growth opportunity. A distinctive sub‐group of corporate self‐initiated expatriates is identified for the first time.

A qualitative study within one company.

The emergent models could be utilized by HR managers to shape future policies and practices for global assignments.

Providing a new model to explicate the relevance of a protean career attitude in a global boundaryless career environment; outlining of new emergent international career trajectories, in particular corporate self‐initiated careers.

Research has shown that autonomy support is a powerful predictor of employee well-being in the West. Despite this importance in the West, the role of autonomy in relation to employee well-being remains relatively understudied in other contexts, such as Malaysia. This is presumably so due to the assumption that employees in a country of excessive hierarchy, like Malaysia, do not value autonomy. Drawing on self-determination theory (SDT), this paper aims to investigate the relationship between employee perceived autonomy support and well-being in the context of Malaysia.

The authors propose that employee-perceived autonomy support is positively related to employee well-being (measured as work engagement and emotional exhaustion) mediated by basic psychological need satisfaction. The authors also hypothesize that the positive relationship is even stronger when employees are less autonomy-oriented. The authors tested this moderated mediation model using a survey of 125 interns in Malaysia.

The results provide strong evidence for the mediating role of need satisfaction when intern well-being is measured as work engagement, while the evidence is less conclusive when employee well-being is measured as emotional exhaustion. Moreover, the moderating effect of autonomy orientation is insignificant.

This paper enhances understanding of the cross-culture applicability of SDT and thereby provided a nuanced understanding of the boundary conditions of autonomy support.

Self-initiated international placements by students have been largely ignored in the literature on outward mobility in higher education. The support given to self-initiated international placement students, if any, has received even less attention. This study aims to address this lacuna.

Drawing on insights from global mobility literature, we conducted a survey of UK university students who engaged in self-initiated international placements to various countries such as France, China, Brazil and Ghana. Data were analysed using descriptive statistics and thematic content analysis.

Findings reveal that these “voluntary” placements can improve language fluency, increase self-confidence, renew stress management abilities and enhance cross-cultural competencies and intercultural sensitivity. The study problematises the lack of support given to these students particularly in terms of career development.

Our paper is one of the first to bring this under-studied population to the attention of career guidance scholars. We propose that scholarly attention should be directed toward the agency of self-initiated international placement students and that targeted career guidance must be provided through more inclusive career services.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the perceptions of self-initiated professional expatriates about their subjective/intangible and objective/tangible successes in both home and host countries.

This is an empirical study using a survey methodology that included a sample of 211 (Male = 120 and Female = 91) employed professionals from India. Structural equation modeling, ANOVA and t-tests were used to analyze the data.

This study is unique in examining a sample from a homogeneous population from one country with one segment deciding to be SIEs while the other segment decided to return to their home country. The application of personal initiative (PI) theory and the theory of intrinsic motivation to SIEs is also relatively new. The focus on female professional SIEs from an emerging market to an advanced economy adds value to this study. The results have implications for employers and policy makers as well as US universities.

This study is unique in examining a sample from a homogenous population from one country with one segment deciding to be SIEs while the other segment deciding to return to their home country. The application of personal initiative (PI) theory to SIEs is also relatively new. The focus on female professional SIEs from an emerging market to an advanced economy adds value to this study. The results have implications for employers and policy makers as well as to US universities.