Of Discovery and Dread: Unpacking the Complex Effects of International Business Travel Frequency

Abstract

The ever-increasing need for a globally mobile workforce has led many employees to take on an often difficult global work role, one requiring frequent international business travel. Due to the dual nature of international business travel – both enriching and depleting – it is still unclear when and how it enables some international business travelers (IBTs) to thrive and embrace their global work role responsibilities, while pushing others to abandon this line of work all together. Following, I suggest that organizations need to provide IBTs with ample developmental opportunities (i.e., work role challenges) as part of their overall work role responsibilities, so as to motivate IBTs and help them to see frequent travel as an enriching, rather than a depleting experience. By integrating two theories of motivation - conservation of resources theory and the challenge-hindrance demands framework - I develop and test a model where, through the psychological state of thriving at work, travel frequency could have both positive and negative indirect effects on IBTs’ intent to abandon their global work role responsibilities (i.e., global role turnover intentions). Using latent moderated structural equation modeling (LMS) to test the proposed model on a sample of 204 IBTs, collected at two different points in time, I found that travel frequency did indeed indirectly affect IBTs’ global role turnover intentions through thriving. The nature of these indirect effects largely depended on the level of work role challenges.