The relationship between work‐role characteristics and intercultural transitional adjustment domain patterns among a sample of US and Canadian expatriates on assignment in Ireland

Abstract

Borrowing from earlier contributions in the cross‐cultural management and international human resource management literatures, firstly we conceptualise expatriate adjustment as a multifaceted construct encompassing work, general, interaction and overall adjustment and then we examine the impact of work‐role characteristics in the form of role novelty, role ambiguity, role conflict and role overload on these different domains of adjustment. With respect to adjustment, while our data, drawn from a postal survey of US and Canadian expatriates on assignment in Ireland, show some variations in work, general, interaction and overall adjustment, the composite measure of overall adjustment reveals that, on the whole, respondents are well adjusted to working and living in Ireland. Turning to the impact of work‐role characteristics on adjustment domains, role novelty is positively correlated with work adjustment. Both role ambiguity and role conflict are negatively correlated with work adjustment. Multiple regression results reveal that, combined, role novelty, role ambiguity, role conflict and role overload account for 31.1 per cent of the variance in work adjustment, 13.4 per cent of the variance in general adjustment, 17.2 per cent in the case of interaction adjustment and 17.5 per cent of the variance in overall adjustment.