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A Critical Review of Expatriate Adjustment Research Through a Multiple Stakeholder View:
Progress, Emerging Trends, and Prospects
This should be a critical review of the expatriate adjustment literature that focuses on studies that have considered other stakeholders in addition to expatriates themselves. To highlight current knowledge in this area, the most important, implicit assumptions that scholars seem to have made and that may have restricted the theoretical and empirical advancement of the literature are delineated. By focusing on these assumptions, this article underscores the importance of other stakeholders in influencing or being influenced by expatriates. This article also highlights three theoretical perspectives as exemplars to extend the existing literature. By so doing, this review identifies gaps and stimulates new research directions on expatriate adjustment.
Social Exchange Perspective
Expatriate Adjustment
Family Domain
Parent Company Domain
Strategic Human Resource Management Perspective
Host Country National Domain
Figure 1 Multiple Stakeholder View of Expatriate Adjustment
1046 Journal of Management / July 2010
Family
Black (1988): Family adjustment → expatriate adjustment
Black and Stephens (1989): Spouse adjustment → expatriate adjustment
*Black et al. (1991): Family/ spouse adjustment → expatriate adjustment
Caligiuri, Hyland, Joshi, and Bross (1998): Family adjustment → expatriate adjustment
aShaffer and Harrison (1998): Spouse adjustment → expatriate adjustment; spouse adjustment → expatriate nonwork satisfaction and early return intention
Caligiuri et al. (1999): Family support → (female) expatriate adjustment
aShaffer et al. (1999): Spouse adjustment → expatriate adjustment
bKraimer et al. (2001): Spouse support → expatriate adjustment
Shaffer and Harrison (2001): Spouse adjustment ← expatriate adjustment
Takeuchi, Yun, and Tesluk (2002): Spouse adjustment ↔ expatriate adjustment
Parent company
*Black, Marshall, and Oddou (1991): Logistical support → expatriate adjustment
*Aycan (1997b): MNC structure, value orientation, life cycle, strategic planning → expatriate adjustment
Caligiuri, Joshi, and Lazarova (1999): POS → (female) expatriate adjustment
aShaffer, Harrison, and Gilley (1999): Logistic support → expatriate adjustment
bKraimer, Wayne, and Jaworski (2001): POS → expatriate adjustment; leader-member exchange (LMX) → task and contextual performance
bKraimer and Wayne (2004): Adjustment/POS → expatriate adjustment, task and contextual performance; LMX (+) → task and contextual performance
Palthe (2004): Parent company socialization → expatriate adjustment
Waxin (2004): Organizational social support (+) → expatriate adjustment
Bhaskar-Shrinivas et al. (2005): Logistic support → expatriate adjustment
cWang and Takeuchi (2007): POS (+)→ expatriate adjustment
Host country nationals (HCNs)
