Abstract
In this paper, we explore the psychological experience of university-educated local workers from emerging economies striving to enter the global job market for managerial positions. Building on qualitative data from sub-Saharan Africa and the Arab Gulf, we conducted two experimental studies in the Arab Gulf to test whether local job candidates feel inhibited to self-advocate for higher compensation in global employment contexts and whether they believe that such negotiating behavior is less appropriate in global than in local work contexts. We theorize that shifting from local to global employment contexts, university-educated locals experience a decline in their status as workers because of a perceived lack of fit with the cosmopolitan “ideal worker.” We find that the contrasting global and local labor-market experiences of local job candidates are moderated by gender because local men experience a greater shift in status between local and global employment contexts than do women. This research contributes to the study of status and gender effects on negotiation by illuminating differential constraints of status and gender on negotiating behavior. This research also has important practical implications for the integration and advancement of workers from emerging economies into global institutions and for our broader understanding of how intersecting status-linked social identities influence career negotiations.
Highlights
We study the psychological experience of university-educated local workers from emerging economies striving to enter the global job market for managerial positions
Gender, and Self-Advocacy in Global Employment We focus on negotiation because it is one of the fundamental social processes in organizational life (Barley, 1991; De Dreu & Gelfand, 2007; Graham, 1995; Katz & Kahn, 1966; Pfeffer, 1981)
We focused our interviews on the United Arab Emirates and South Africa, which, since the lifting of Apartheid, has been the spear tip of Sub-Saharan Africa’s entry into the global economy
Summary
We explore the psychological experience of university-educated local workers from emerging economies striving to enter the global job market for managerial positions. While some local expertise is valuable in international work (Haas, 2006), locals defy the prototype of the ideal global worker (Acker, 1990; Connell, 1998; Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005; Freeman, 2001). This contrast becomes acute when locals are nationals of non-Western emerging economies, such as the Middle East, Africa, or Latin America (Gillespie, McBride & Riddle, 2010; Rissing & Castilla, 2014). As illustrated by the opening quotes, there is a perceived “lack of fit” (Heilman, 1983) between the local and the ideal global candidate
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