Expatriation: corporate policy, personal intentions and international adjustment

Abstract

Western business expatriates participated in a mail survey examining corporate expatriation policies, personal intentions of expatriation and the expatriates' extent of international adjustment. As expected, there is a clear positive association between personal expatriate intentions and both socio-cultural and psychological adjustment. Also, as presumed, corporate policy that encourages expatriates to take up successive assignments to create a pool of mobile expatriates has little association with either dimension of international adjustment. On the other hand, making it difficult to change over from an expatriate career to a domestic career is negatively related to psychological adjustment. Implications of these findings for business expatriates and for their assigning corporations are discussed