Abstract
Personality traits can predict how well-sojourners and expatriates adjust to new cultures, but the adjustment process remains largely unexamined. Based on recent findings that reveal personality traits predict as well as respond to life events and experiences, this research focuses on within-person change in contextualized extraversion and its predictive validity for cross-cultural adjustment in international students who newly arrived in US colleges. We proposed that the initial level as well as the rate of change in school extraversion (i.e., contextualized extraversion that reflects behavioral tendency in school settings) will predict cross-cultural adjustment, withdrawal cognitions, and school satisfaction. Latent growth modeling of three-wave longitudinal surveys of 215 new international students (54% female, Mage = 24 years) revealed that the initial level of school extraversion significantly predicted cross-cultural adjustment, (lower) withdrawal cognitions, and satisfaction, while the rate of change (increase) in school extraversion predicted cross-cultural adjustment and (lower) withdrawal cognitions. We further modeled global extraversion and cross-cultural motivation as antecedents and explored within-person change in school extraversion as a proximal factor that affects adjustment outcomes. The findings highlight the malleability of contextualized personality, and more importantly, the importance of understanding within-person change in contextualized personality in a cross-cultural adjustment context. The study points to more research that explicate the process of personality change in other contexts.
Highlights
In today’s global economy, adapting and adjusting to new cultures as sojourners and expatriates have become increasingly important
Global extraversion positively correlated with school extraversion assessed at each time point, and the estimates were in line with the correlations previous reported between global and contextualized personality (e.g., Bing et al, 2004; Heller et al, 2009)
We examined whether school extraversion at the initial time point added incremental validity above and beyond global extraversion in predicting crosscultural adjustment outcomes
Summary
In today’s global economy, adapting and adjusting to new cultures as sojourners and expatriates have become increasingly important. Given the importance of understanding the antecedents of cross-cultural adjustment, there has been a growing interest in identifying individual characteristics to predict cross-cultural. Following research on personality change (e.g., Vaidya et al, 2002; Lüdtke et al, 2011), it is likely that sojourners experience personality change in response to the changes they encounter in a new cultural environment. It remains to be seen whether such change can predict cross-cultural adjustment
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