What We Do and Do Not Know about Employees' Willingness to Accept an Expatriate Assignment: Meta-Analysis, Literature Review, and Examination of an Integrative Model

In today’s knowledge-intensive and fast-paced global business reality, more and more organizations rely not only on their operations to be globalized, but also their talents to be globally competent and mobile. Organization-assigned expatriates play a critical role in the long-term success of global-minded organizations, however, expatriate assignments are risky endeavors in nature and employees do not always respond to the idea of expatriate assignment positively. According to several recent surveys by the Brookfield Global Relocation Services (2016) and Business Weekly Magazine and 104 Corporation (2017), more organizations, both internationally and domestically, are seeing a lot more difficulty in motivating their top candidates to accept an expatriate assignment offer. This low level of employee willingness to accept an expatriate assignment creates tremendous problems and challenges for global-minded organizations.Employees’ willingness to accept an expatriate assignment has been of interest to expatriate researchers for quite some time, however, while the existing literature has deepen our understanding on what motivates and attracts employees to accept an expatriate assignment, there is still a lot to be learned (e.g., unexplored antecedents and inconsistent findings). Therefore, to enhance what we do and do not know about the antecedents of employee willingness to accept an expatriate assignment, the present project seeks to assess and widen the nomological network of employee willingness to accept an expatriate assignment over the course of two years. In the first year, this project will first locate all the relevant studies, both published or unpublished. Then, meta-analytic methods will be used to examine the antecedents-employee willingness to accept an expatriate assignment relationships at the individual level. For antecedents that are unable to be included in the meta-analysis, they will be included in the systematic literature review. The objective of the first-year project is to provide the first extensive meta-analysis/literature review on all studies that examined employee willingness to accept an expatriate assignment. The second year of the present project will build on the first year by examining an integrative model of the effects of employee willingness to accept an expatriate assignment on expatriate social capital development, and then knowledge transfer and expatriate adjustment. More recently, both researchers and practitioners alike have become increasingly interested in ways that expatriates contribute to the knowledge transfer within organizations. And knowledge transfer needs social capital. Thus, this project examines whether expatriates’ initial willingness to accept the expatriate assignment affects their subsequent social capital development, as well as their ability to transfer knowledge and level of adjustment during assignments. To test the model, the targeted study population will be employees who are currently working for Taiwanese organizations and are presently on expatriate assignment in overseas. The objective of the second-year project is provide the first test of whether willingness to accept the expatriate assignment increases social capital development, and then knowledge transfer and adjustment.