Is global mobility disappearing?

Citation

Selmer, J. (2018), "Is global mobility disappearing?", Journal of Global Mobility, Vol. 6 No. 1, pp. 2-3. https://doi.org/10.1108/JGM-01-2018-0001

Is global mobility disappearing?

With anti-globalization movements gaining ever more attention, you may be forgiven for suspecting that global mobility is on the decrease. But nothing could be further from the truth! Recently, consultants forecasted that the number of multinationals will grow and that the international mobility of their employees will increase even more rapidly – exceeding one million by 2021. This global trend for international mobility is because smaller and medium-sized multinationals, especially in the Asia-Pacific area, are driving growth and encouraging greater movement of employees around the world. In addition to this future corporate expansion of global mobility, there has been a corresponding increase in the number of self-initiated expatriates for work purposes. These trends portend a very bright future for scholars and other researchers trying to understand various issues and challenges of global mobility. Since JGM is the only academic journal to consistently and exclusively focus on expatriate management and global mobility, we are set to greatly benefit from these future developments of global mobility.

JGM is indexed in Scopus (CiteScore 2016: 1.65) and ESCI. The journal is also ranked by the Australian ABDC List as a B journal and ranked by the Nordic countries and Brazil. The Editorial Advisory Board reads as a Who’s Who in our area and the editorial team, reviewers and authors are all specialists. Truly, JGM is managed by experts, for experts.

In 2017, two special issues of JGM were published. The first was, Beyond Corporate Expatriation: Examining Neglected Non-Corporate Communities, edited by Yvonne McNulty, Charles Vance and Kelly Fisher. The second special issue last year was, Dangerous Moves and Risky International Assignments, edited by Luisa Helena Pinto, Benjamin Bader, and Tassilo Schuster. Two more special issues are scheduled for this year: On Stakeholders and their Stakes in the Expatriation Process, edited by Thomas Hippler and Michael Morley and Reimagining Expatriation Cycles edited by Anthony Fee, Peter Dowling and Allen Engle. All JGM special issues aim to fill important research gaps in extant literature.

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

In this issue

The first article, authored by Jeffrey C. Kennedy, is a conceptual model of forbearance of culturally inappropriate leadership behaviors. Adopting the perspective of the HCNs, the author suggests several important lines of research into the initial establishment of an effective working relationship between expatriates and HCNs. There are also suggestions for further elaboration and testing of the model. The second paper, by Yu-Ping Chen and Margaret Shaffer, investigates how expatriate spouses’ coping strategies affect expatriate spouse adjustment and expatriate adjustment. Results suggest that organizations may want to pay equal attention to the adjustment of both expatriates and their spouses by including both parties in the initial selection process and in pre-departure training. This is one of the first examinations investigating expatriate spouses’ coping strategies and their impact on expatriate and expatriate spouse adjustment, highlighting the interdependency between them. The succeeding article is written by Benjamin Bader, Sebastian Stoermer, Anna Katharina Bader, and Tassilo Schuster. Examining institutional discrimination of women and workplace harassment of female expatriates, they present evidence from 25 host countries. They find that female expatriates experience more workplace gender harassment than their male counterparts, and more so in host countries with strong institutional-level gender discrimination. There are also effects of gender harassment on expatriates’ frustration and job satisfaction as well as an association between frustration and job satisfaction. The fourth article, by Snejina Michailova and Diana L. Ott, examines the literature on the relationship between international experience (IE) and cultural intelligence (CQ) development claiming that CQ can be developed through IE. Based on 15 empirical articles and 3 book chapters, they detect considerable variation and inconsistencies among the findings. Arguing that this is because most studies fail to apply a theory to explain the link between these two constructs, they draw from the social learning theory to illustrate how it can be done. Article number five in this issue is authored by Ibraiz Tarique and Randall Schuler and presents a multi-level framework for understanding global talent management (GTM) systems for high talent expatriates of MNEs. Important antecedents and outcomes of a subsidiary’s GTM system are described and several propositions for future empirical and theoretical research are proposed. Since existing scholarly GTM frameworks used by practitioners do not take into account multi-level complexities, both practitioners and researchers may benefit by adopting this multi-level framework to manage their subsidiary expatriate talent. The sixth and last contribution to this issue has four authors: Martin Mabunda Baluku, Dorothee Löser, Kathleen Otto, and Steffen Erik Schummer. They investigate how a protean career personality and attitude shapes international mobility and entrepreneurial intentions in young professionals. Reporting two studies, of undergraduate students and early career professionals, respectively, they examine the role of protean career personality and they look at career orientation attitude as the explaining link. Essential for career guidance, the paper reveals differential roles of these traits and attitudes among the two groups, with regard to expatriation and entrepreneurship.

Celebrating the bright future of global mobility, JGM, a specialist academic research journal, attracts both reputable authors and readers by creating expert content for experts. The JGM Editorial Advisory Board, the editorial team and the best specialist reviewers all contribute to establishing JGM as the leading outlet for academic research on global mobility and expatriate management.