The future of global mobility

Citation

Selmer, J. (2016), "The future of global mobility", Journal of Global Mobility, Vol. 4 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/JGM-01-2016-0001

The future of global mobility

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Global Mobility, Volume 4, Issue 1.

What promotes global mobility? The Economist recently quoted an excerpt from an article about the next 50 years of management that was published in the business magazine, McKinsey Quarterly. According to this paper, about “half of the world’s GDP growth between 2010 and 2025 will come from 440 cities in emerging markets.” And, it is envisioned that “by 2025 no less than 45 percent of businesses on Fortune’s Global 500 list of the world’s biggest companies will be based in emerging markets, compared with just 5 percent in 2000.” Businesses need to learn about these cities, which span the globe from Africa to Latin America, since they may be home to both competitors and customers. During the next decade, this shift in the global economy could create strong growth in the global mobility of expatriates as well as alternative forms of international assignees and business travelers. This shift could further focus academic research on emerging markets as host countries. And this time, the center of attention could be a number of big and obscure cities in the developing world, many with unique cultures and idiosyncrasies of their own. This projected future could become a strong developmental driver of the area of global mobility as well as an opportunity for JGM to publish novel academic research based on dimensions of host locations other than countries.

As a new journal, JGM needs to offer a better service than many established academic journals. We offer a prompt and professional revise and resubmit process. As a specialist research journal, exclusively focussing on global mobility and expatriate management issues, JGM is “for experts, by experts.” That means submitted manuscripts are only reviewed by other experts in the area, ensuring that authors receive high quality, developmental feedback.

JGM aims to publish special issues to feature important but under-researched topics. Our upcoming special issues on “Alternative forms of global mobility: fresh insights about frequent flyers, short-term, rotational and virtual assignments, international business commuters”, guest-edited by Maike Andresen, Michael Dickman and Arno Haslberger, as well as “Expatriates in context: expanding perspectives on the expatriate situation” with Fabian Froese and Soo Min Toh as guest editors, contribute to fill considerable research gaps in the extant literature.

We welcome all kinds of rigorous research methods, but are also keen to publish thorough theoretical developments and focussed literature reviews. Besides that, we are interested in research at various levels of analysis – individual, team, organizational or even national. We also encourage research from a variety of academic domains, as well as cross-disciplinary studies.

In this issue

The first paper, authored by Paula Caligiuri, Natalyia Baytalskaya and Mila B. Lazarova, focusses on humility and ethnocentrism as influencing expatriates’ reception of local feedback and direction and, ultimately, their performance. The authors found that expatriates higher in cultural humility benefit more from the support and feedback offered in the host national work environment which, in turn, facilitates better supervisor-ratings of performance. Additionally, expatriates’ ethnocentrism has a negative influence on their ratings of performance. Their results have implications for expatriate selection and for ways to manage the host national environment to improve expatriate performance. As one of the first to empirically test the potential role of categorization of expatriates in the process of their socialization, the paper by Shirley C. Sonesh and Angelo S. DeNisi continues on a similar theme. Based on survey data from expatriate-HCN dyads, results showed that expatriate ethnocentrism and the salience of the expatriates’ nationality were important predictors of categorization, but that categorization was related to only one dimension of socialization. Implications of these findings include assigning expatriates with the right relational skills, and those low in ethnocentrism, rather than just those with the right technical skills. The third paper, by Fenny Ang and Hwee Hoon Tan, remains within this general area of enquiry. Trying to understand how expatriate managers build trust with their host-country nationals in China, results from data collected via interviews with both expatriates and locals in Shanghai show that both parties need to demonstrate their work competence at the initial stage of the relationship to form cognitive trust. Building trust over time, successful expatriates enact culturally intelligent behaviors to promote perceptions of trustworthiness in host-country nationals who in turn, reciprocate with affect-based trust. Anne Burmeister and Jürgen Deller examine organizational support practices that facilitate repatriate knowledge transfer. In two studies, results based on data collected from both repatriates and human resource managers showed that organizations primarily provide administrative support to repatriates while strategic and knowledge transfer-related support is missing. Additionally, knowledge-related debriefing sessions after repatriation and targeted internal communication mechanisms were seen as important for repatriate knowledge transfer while selection and financial rewards were perceived as irrelevant. The final paper in this issue, authored by Christian Nowak and Christian Linder, is a conceptual approach to examine expatriate ROI from the corporate return on investment perspective with an overarching focus on costs. They show how to determine the costs of major phases of expatriation allowing for the calculation of the breakeven point of an international assignment and their model can be applied to compare alternative methods of international mobility. They identify crucial cost drivers allowing for recommendations for associated management action.

Emphasizing cities instead of countries as host locations is a novel approach in extant academic research on global mobility and expatriate management. It may add complexity but recognizes the simple fact that “context matters.” Differences between the cities of Kumasi in Ghana and Porto Alegre in Brazil could considerably affect global mobility in dissimilar ways. Such city variations and their consequences could be examined in academic research as important contextual factors, especially since the world’s dominant economic growth in the future may come from such big and obscure cities. This is a good example of what JGM strives to publish. JGM attracts both reputable scholars and readers by creating expert content for experts. The JGM editorial team and the best reviewers all contribute to make JGM the leading outlet for academic research on global mobility and expatriate management.

Jan Selmer