Home and away: How career adaptability and cultural intelligence facilitate international migrant workers' adjustment

Abstract

The steady upsurge of international labor migration has raised new and important questions for career scholars: how do migrant workers adjust to their work and living conditions and what accounts for their successful adaptation? We address these issues in two time-lagged and multi-source field studies involving Filipino migrant workers in the Middle East. In Study 1, we found that migrant workers' career adaptability promotes work and general adjustment, which in turn enhances their work (i.e., job performance and retention) and psychological health (i.e., life satisfaction) outcomes. In Study 2, we found that the indirect effects of career adaptability on work and psychological health outcomes via work and general adjustment were stronger for migrant workers with high, rather than low, levels of cultural intelligence. Implications for research and practice are discussed along with the study limitations and opportunities for future research.