Is There No Place Like Home? Expatriates' Locus of Control Personality, Self-efficacy, Cross-cultural Adjustment, and Organizational Support for Expatriate Career

Abstract

Expatriates are crucial for multinational corporations' internationalization strategy due to their connective position between headquarters and overseas branches. Understanding expatriates' willingness to remain in the foreign branches may allow organizations to avoid wasting the substantial cost of international human resource transitions and to strengthen the effectiveness of firm strategic deployment. Perceived causality orientation in the international job transition may influence how expatriates cognitively adjust themselves to fit into a new cultural environment, though little work has considered the psychological processes that influence employees’ intention to stay. The study, therefore, explores the relationship between expatriates' causality orientation and their intention to remain in the foreign position through the mediating effect of cross-cultural adjustment process. This considers the social cognitive theory (SCT) and investigates the moderating role of expatriates' self-efficacy and perceived organizational support for their career. The hypotheses proposed in this paper are tested using a unique sample of 219 Taiwanese expatriates in Vietnam. Results show that expatriates with high levels of internal control personality have higher cross-cultural adjustment, and expatriates with better adjustment in different cultural contexts have stronger willingness to stay. However, external locus of control weakens the expatriates' cross-cultural adjustment process when they have low levels of self-efficacy. Counterintuitively, the findings suggest that expatriates’ perceived organizational career support will reduce the positive relationship between their cross-cultural adjustment and the intention to stay.