The Cross-Cultural Career Development Process Of Self-initiated Expatriates’ With Global Work Experiences

One of the critical challenges in the study of international human resource that is faced by human resource researcher and practitioners are development, adjustment and retention of self-initiated expatriates (SIEs) in their new cultural environment (Dowling et al.,1994; Tharenou,2013; Andresen et al.,2014). Because SIEs independently choose to expatriate and their expatriation experiences are riskier and more unpredictable than corporate expatriates (CEs) who are sponsored by organizations to take an international assignment for a specific time and prepared for better interaction with their employees from different cultural backgrounds and regions. Thus, this study provides a new construct for SIEs which named "career initiatives" and presented as a new attitude tendency it may play a critical role in supporting their self-direction in their global work experiences. Thus, the aim of this work is to evolve and test a theoretically driven model of SIEs’career development in international workspaces. Also, this thesis plans to raise our understanding of SBE’s responses to organizational change context.In this study, empirically involved quantitative and qualitative methods "mixed method design" to explore cross-cultural career development process of SIE’s career initiative during their global work experiences. This study is separated into the four studies, according to the main research question "How can SIEs develop their career during their global work experiences?" The first study is to identify and represent the career challenges which SIEs encounter during their expatriation based on the previous studies. Also, this study conducted multiple case study to understand the first sub-question; what is the self-initiated expatriate new attitude tendency which can help them to develop in their career? Thus, I employed 10 SIEs as a sample study, through semi-structured and in-depth interviews to provide more detail case study data. Therefore, by this research, I proposed career initiatives as a new concept or as a new attitude tendency which can help SIEs to recognize their global career orientations. This might aid them in becoming more proactive, self-oriented, and overcome barriers which can help them to reduce the difficulties with and develop their career during their expatriation.The goal of the second study focused on scale developing. This study involved case studies from study one in developing new scales for career initiative. Also, manifested career initiatives by two characteristics:explore orientation and establishment orientation, which they are included by four terms:job orientation, value orientation, psychological orientation, and self-orientation. Finally, I checked the interaction of these four terms which created new four dimensions:Reflection orientation, Ideal orientation, Preference orientation, Boundaryless orientation. In the scale development process I conducted Inductive and deductive approaches (Hinkin,1998). Items pools generated 27 items. Data Collected from 289 SIEs living and working in China. In Analysis, a strategy the 289 samples, split half for Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) (Tang,2009), and the result indicated 13 items out of items pools are qualified for my new concept "career initiative"In the third study, I consider a second sub-question "How to do career initiatives influence SIE’s adjustment and performance". The goal of this study to shows the importance of the career initiative as career attitude by tracking the career orientations of this group of SIE. In this study to test the relationship of variables, I collected data from 265 SIEs’, who are originally from different nations/regions and are living and working in China. Also, for data Analysis, I employed CFA, process model (SPSS software) (Andrew F. Hayes,2015). The findings of this study indicate the central role played by career initiative during SIE’s cross-cultural adjustments and performances. This study identified career initiatives as a means to understanding SIE’s adjustments to the host country and techniques which can lessen culture shocks and improve their performance in order to meet career development goals.Final or study four focused on the third sub-question’’What are antecedent factors’ which shapes the SIEs career initiatives?", This study aims to examine the relationship between Initiative action and SIEs career initiative which moderated by career change support. Under the high-level context of career change support, the relationship would be weakened/strengthened when SIEs received low/high support from their supervisor. The sample was collected from 265 SIEs and 107 managers of multinational companies in China. Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM 6.08) was used to test two levels; organizational and individual level. The results indicated that cultural value-Integration and Initiative action make significant contributions to SIEs career initiatives. The moderating roles of organizational change support were also confirmed in this study. This study attempted to clarify the interconnectedness of SIE’s career initiatives with other related constructs from different levels, also to raise understanding of Human Resource Management (HRM) on SIE’s career orientations and development.In theoretical contribution, this study contributes to SIE in the cross-cultural process. Specifically, this study contributes to the SIE literature by employing career development (e.g., Super,1990; 1992) to explain the cross-cultural career development process within SIEs as a new mechanism which is focused on "how" SIEs can develop their career during their global work experiences. Also, in empirical contribution, this study demonstrated the influence of career initiatives on SIE’s behavior in the context of organizational change and to use this knowledge to identify HRM practice. This would enable a better understanding of SIE’s characteristics, which types of reactions we can expect from them and which motivational practices should be used to increase SIE’s involvement in organizations change context.Our study has two limitations. First, this study conducted the cross-sectional study, in future studies needs to provide a longitudinal study to examine the influence of the career initiative on SIEs in different stages of their expatriation. Second, relatively small sample size (at the company level) may not give us a robust result, in future studies requires more samples. Also, I consider two directions for future studies. First, for expatriate status, the future studies need to compare the terms of career initiatives between SIE and CE. Second, I encourage future research to investigate similar issues in other cultural contexts.