Expatriate Adjustment Essay

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CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW

2.0 Overview

This chapter will discussed about the literature review and it will be divided into four sections which are expatriate adjustment, culture novelty, previous overseas work experience, and foreign language ability. These factors were chosen as they had been thoroughly used before in studies of organizational expatriates.

2.1 Expatriate Adjustment (Dependent Variable)

Expatriates are defined as individuals who relocate from one country to the other for at least one year (Littrell, Salas, Hess, Paley, & Riedel, 2006). Expatriate definition is different with short term visits because during a short term visit, individual is mentally aware that he or she is going back to home country, and is aware that it does not require as much adjustment as long term expatriation (Joshua-Gojer, 2012). Past researches have different views about adjustment and they have defined adjustment in terms of subjective wellbeing (Campbell, 1981) or unhappy feelings of expatriates about their circumstances (Munton & West, 1995). However, the most acceptable definition for adjustment was from Black (1988), he said that adjustment refers to psychological discomfort which can be categorised as work, general and interaction adjustment.

Black & Stephens (1989) classified expatriate adjustment into three-dimensions (i)general adustment– adjusting to housing food, shopping, and other aspects of the foreigner culture, (ii)work adjustment– meeting job responsibilities and performance expectations, and (iii)interaction adjustment – socializing and speaking with host country nationals.

Selmer (2005) argued that these are the certain aspects of expatriate adjustment. According to Lee & Sukoco (2010), these three aspects...

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...nteresting finding is that the fluency in the host-country language worsened the effects of role conflict on adjustment (Shaffer, Harrison, & Gilley, 1999). Although a business conversation may be conducted in English, people may certainly think in their own language according to their own cultural norms, which may not be fully understood. Another research said that, corporate language training is part of expatriate preparations (Hayet, 2000). Language learning may improve international adjustment and lead to increased satisfaction and fewer turnovers (Shaffer & Harrison, 1998).

The language barrier is potentially high in situations where cultures are widely differing and languages may not even share a common alphabet, for example between the West and China, making it extremely difficult for expatriates to acquire a high degree of language ability (Selmer, 2006)

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