Expatriation and Incapacity created by a Multitude of Hidden Inequalities

The ability of UK based Academics to function within collaborative partnerships is becoming an important part of the UK Universities internationalisation agenda. This chapter offers an auto-ethnographical academic expatriate experience detailing some of the challenges faced when moving to work in a ‘UK environment positioned abroad’, specifically in China. It will provide HR personnel with alternative understandings of possible support strategies that could assist individuals in dealing with a variety of hidden inequalities that surface. These hidden inequalities can contribute to a possible shortening of the assignment due to cultural contexts in which they are operating (Foster 1997; Wang and Varma 2017)

The impact of cultural intelligence on communication effectiveness, job satisfaction and anxiety for Chinese host country managers working for foreign multinationals

In the last two decades, the private sector has contracted a substantially larger share in the total amount of foreign-currency international debt (private sector share of external debt), especially in developing countries. In this paper, I empirically examine the effect of this phenomenon on bank loan prices. I find that the private sector share of external debt negatively and significantly impacts the price of bank loans. This result supports the hypothesis that private sector debt contributes to international financial stability to a greater degree than sovereign debt. Nevertheless, this impact is canceled out in the presence of fixed exchange regimes that are unsuitable with respect to fundamentals. In such circumstances, the private sector may take advantage of capital market distortions that are maintained by official authorities and thus exposes the country to further financial instability. Additional results corroborate the observation that the gain in financial stability stems from more efficient use of funds and reduced monitoring costs.Cultural intelligence (CQ) is an important construct attracting growing attention in academic literature and describing cross-cultural competencies. To date, researchers have only partially tested the relationship between CQ and its dependent variables, such as performance. In this study, the relationship between CQ and communication effectiveness and job satisfaction is measured in a sample of 225 Chinese managers working for foreign multinational enterprises in China. The results show that CQ plays an important role in reducing anxiety and influencing both communication effectiveness and job satisfaction positively. Another outcome is the unexpected influence of anxiety on job satisfaction but not on communication effectiveness. These findings contribute to the development of theory with regard to the CQ construct

Cultural intelligence, cross-cultural adaptation and expatriate performance: a study with expatriates living in Brazil

Developing a competitive workforce abroad is a relevant challenge to organizations with multinational activities. In view of this, added to the high costs associated with expatriation, it is necessary to identify the factors that facilitate a satisfactory performance of executives in international assignments. Thus, the purpose of this work is to investigate the relationship between cultural intelligence, cross-cultural adaptation and expatriates performance. Based on a sample of 217 expatriates from 26 countries living in Brazil, the research reveals a positive association between cultural intelligence and cross-cultural adaptation, and the latter with expatriates’ performance. However, the direct relationship between cultural intelligence and expatriates performance was not significant. The results also revealed an indirect relationship between cultural intelligence and expatriates performance mediated by cross-cultural adaptation. Thus, we suggest that cultural intelligence converts itself into the ability of the expatriate to better adapt to the new culture, which then results in performance. Based on Allport's Contact Theory (Pettigrew, 1998), which has the assumption that increased interactions between members of different ethnic groups can lead to increased mutual understanding, reduce hostilities, prejudices and the formation of friendships between groups in different social contexts (Kim, 2012, Pettigrew and Tropp, 2006), we thus suggest that this transformation process is facilitated and powered by the increase of interactions between expatriates and the host country nationals. Suggestions for future research and for practice are presented