Turnover activities and international adjustment of defense administrators

Understanding how expatriate workers adjust to their overseas work and living environments is a topic of both practical and theoretical importance. On a practical level, businesses, governments, and other organizations invest major resources in training and relocating employees abroad, and if such overseas placements fail to achieve satisfactory results, the costs in money, lost productivity, and poor human resources outcomes can be significant. Improving expatriate adjustment to his/her new culture is therefore a priority issue in the increasingly global marketplace. But the issue is also of considerable theoretical importance, involving relationships among concepts of culture, organizational socialization, and worker training to performance balance.; This study investigated the process of adjustment to an expatriate work situation among a population of middle managers---in this case, U.S. Department of Defense administrators assigned to embassies. The sample included 174 managers widely distributed around the world, from a total population of 314 (55%). These managers embody the expatriate experience in full detail and in many diverse places, yet the positions they fill are similar enough in overall structure and responsibilities to allow interesting comparisons to be made. A number of job and personal features were hypothesized on the basis of prior research to affect effective adjustment, including role clarity, role ambiguity, role conflict, self-efficacy, and personal orientation. The range of outcomes included socio-cultural adjustment, psychological adjustment, work adjustment and satisfaction. Certain aspects of pre-departure training and on-site mentoring were also investigated. Data were obtained from a survey distributed and collected through interoffice email, a readily accessible and well-understood communication channel. No significant problems were encountered in data collection.; Results supported the hypothesized relationships between successful adjustment outcomes and self-efficacy, personal "other" orientation, clearly defined goals, low role ambiguity, and limited role conflict. In addition, it was found that senior management support for headquarters policies enhances expatriate adjustment. Also, it was found that pre-departure training did not affect cross-cultural adjustment, but did affect satisfaction.; Open-ended comments by the respondents provided further insights into the experience, including the role of mentors from nearby countries in filling in gaps in knowledge left by pre-departure training. Other aspects of the problem elaborated by comments included the importance of understanding the host country's language prior to arrival, the perceived importance of the job itself as a predictor of expatriate satisfaction, and the importance of logistic support and human resource support to the adjustment of the expatriate.