Expatriate Success: A Kaleidoscopic Construct

Identifier:  TDX:4448

Handle: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11797/TDX4448

Authors:  El Amine, Nour

Abstract:
In the current fiercely competitive and global landscape, expatriation is increasingly critical for individuals and businesses. Organisations' success is closely tied to their expatriates' success, making the latter a key concept in expatriate management research. Despite the many investigations aiming to understand this construct, there is no consensus on its dimensions while often overlooking its subjective nature. To address this ambiguity, this thesis, through three studies, aims to provide a comprehensive definition of expatriate success and explore its multidimensionality by taking a nuanced approach to investigate the influence of understudied individual-level antecedents on expatriates' success subjective dimensions, thereby highlighting its phenomenological and socially constructed nature. The first study undertakes a systematic literature review on expatriate success, proposing a comprehensive definition that illustrates its multidimensional nature, encompassing objective and subjective aspects. It also elucidates the interplay between the antecedents and dimensions influencing expatriate success across individual, interpersonal, and organisational levels. Building on the first study, the second empirically validates the multidimensional nature of the construct by challenging the conventional notion, often equating expatriate adjustment to performance. It also sheds light on the impact of individual-level factors relatively overlooked by investigating the relationship between PsyCAP and expatriate adjustment and performance separately. The third study delves into the subjective measure of expatriate success, exploring how various salient social identities shape expatriates' perceptions of success and underscores the significance of identities as precursors to perceived success, a notion previously overlooked in expatriate studies. In summary, this thesis highlights the multidimensionality of expatriate success and advocates for a nuanced approach that considers objective and subjective measures while acknowledging the evolving nature of expatriate experiences and their unique contexts. These findings have significant theoretical and practical implications for expatriate management, providing a more nuanced understanding of expatriate success and its determinants.