What do global employees really do?

Citation

Selmer, J. (2016), "What do global employees really do?", Journal of Global Mobility, Vol. 4 No. 3, pp. 254-256. https://doi.org/10.1108/JGM-08-2016-0034

What do global employees really do?

The answer to this question is simply, we do not know. Although there are techniques to study this, few investigations have examined the daily behavior of global employees in detail. The parallel to the historic problem of finding out what managers really do is obvious. In the 1950s, Sune Carlsson performed his classic study of Swedish managing directors by asking them to record on diary pads details of each activity in which they engaged. In the 1960s, Henry Mintzberg used a method called “structured observation,” observing for one-week periods the chief executives of five organizations. Over the years, this initial arsenal of techniques has developed further and there are now plenty of procedures available to study what global employees really do. Of the various forms of global employees, we know more about expatriates than others, such as frequent international business travelers and short-term assignees. However, the fact is, there is an embarrassing dearth of studies of the daily behaviors of any type of global employee, including expatriates.

The Journal of Global Mobility (JGM) is a unique outlet for publishing such studies as it is the only specialist academic research journal that exclusively focusses on global mobility and global employee issues. The revise and resubmit process of JGM is prompt and professional. Submitted manuscripts are reviewed by experts and authors receive high-quality, developmental feedback. And, the journal has a policy of a one-month turnaround of the first submission.

The JGM special issue this year is Expatriates in Context: Expanding Perspectives on the Expatriate Situation with Fabian Froese and Soo Min Toh as guest editors. Next year, JGM will publish two special issues: Beyond Corporate Expatriation: Examining Neglected Non-Corporate Communities, edited by Yvonne McNulty, Kelly Fisher, and Charles Vance as well as Dangerous Moves and Risky International Assignments, edited by Luisa Helena Pinto, Benjamin Bader, and Tassilo Schuster. All JGM special issues aim to contribute to filling important research gaps in extant literature.

A broad spectrum of rigorous research methods applied to empirical research is welcome at JGM. But non-empirical research, such as thorough theoretical developments and conceptual studies as well as focussed literature reviews, is also of high value. Research studies at various levels of analysis – individual, team, organizational, or even national – or any multi-level combination, are also of interest to the journal. With our wide perspective, within the domain of expatriate management and other global mobility issues, we would like to publish research from a variety of academic domains, including business and management, as well as cross-disciplinary studies.

Recently, we have founded the JGM-Club. Members form a group of scholars interested in expatriation and global mobility issues across all forms of global employees. This will facilitate exchange of new research ideas and projects to create collaboration among club members. The JGM-Club consists of authors and reviewers of JGM as well as the JGM Editorial Team and the Editorial Advisory Board. Hence, the JGM-Club is a closed group and membership is by invitation only. The JGM-Club also exists as a (closed) LinkedIn group, for effective interaction between members. Become a JGM author or reviewer and secure your invitation to the JGM-Club.

In this issue

The first paper in this issue, authored by Frithjof Arp and Michal Lemanski, examines the mobility of ideas between MNC headquarters and subsidiaries and whether it sometimes constitutes intra-corporate plagiarism. They also discuss antecedents and consequences of such negatively perceived mobility of ideas. The authors suggest that, besides obvious negative results of intra-corporate plagiarism, it may counterintuitively increase the mobility of ideas within MNCs. Practical consequences that MNCs may wish to consider in their knowledge management are also offered. The authors of the second paper, Arno Haslberger and Michael Dickmann, outline an alternative conceptual model of expatriate adjustment: the correspondence model. Based on person-environment (P-E) fit theory, this model follows Dawis and Lofquist’s Theory of Work Adjustment (TWA), which is a relatively neglected theoretical base of expatriate research. Numerous hypotheses about cross-cultural adjustment are proposed allowing for new avenues in research on expatriate adjustment. The third contribution to this issue is an paper by Joost Bücker, Olivier Furrer and Tanja Peeters Weem, investigating the Cultural Intelligence Scale, specifically examining the cross-cultural equivalence of the complete original scale and a shorter version of the same scale. Because recent cultural intelligence literature rarely offers evidence of measurement equivalence, the finding that scores across cultures is only meaningful with the use of the shorter version of the original scale, the lack of clarity concerning the cross-cultural equivalence of the original scale is addressed by this study. The fourth paper, written by Pooja B. Vijayakumar and Christopher J.L. Cunningham, deals with relationship between motives for expatriation and cross-cultural adjustment of Indian expatriates working in the US IT industry. Based on data from 336 Indian IT professionals working in America, findings indicate that respondents with stronger financial (mercenary) motives for expatriation also reported less positive cultural adjustment, while those with stronger exploratory motives for expatriation reported more positive cultural adjustment. The results may help organizations and consultants working to prepare expatriates, especially of Indian descent, for their assignments in the USA. The last contribution to this issue is authored by Reimara Valk and Sandra Hannon. In a case study, they examine engagement of rotational assignees in the oil and gas industry. Required to work for a set number of days at a given site before returning home for a set number of days off, rotational international assignments are used on oil rigs and other remote locations. Findings suggest that it becomes imperative to increase engagement of rotational assignees to improve organizational performance and sustainable global competitive advantage.

What global employees do may depend on what kind of global employee they are. There are currently many types of global employees, including, but not limited to, traditional corporate expatriates assigned abroad by a corporation, self-initiated expatriates who make their own way to a job in a foreign location, short-term assignees who go abroad for perhaps two to three months at a time, and frequent international business travelers who are based in their home country but make numerous business trips abroad each year. Is it reasonable to assume that different types of global employees behave differently at work? We have no answer to this question. Also, beside the place of work, are there unique behaviors outside work? Again, we do not know the answer to this question either since research studies of global employee daily behavior in the private sphere of life in a foreign location are rare. JGM is very interested in alleviating this crucial dearth of knowledge by publishing studies on what global employees really do. JGM is well equipped to handle such publications. The managerial team and the reviewers of JGM are all experts, to the benefit of our expert authors. JGM is proud to be an outlet “for experts, by experts.”