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Integrating anxiety and uncertainty management (AUM) theory and theory of organizing, this study aims to contribute to the knowledge management literature by examining the interdependent and bidirectional nature of knowledge transfer between expatriates and host country nationals (HCNs). Specifically, the authors investigate how receivers’ cognitive response to senders’ behaviors during their interactions becomes an important conduit between senders’ behaviors and the successful transfer of knowledge.

The authors used the actor partner interdependence model to analyze data from 107 expatriate-HCN dyads. The authors collected the responses of these expatriate-HCN dyads in Shanghai, Taipei, Hong Kong, Vietnam, South Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and India.

Receivers’ interaction anxiety and uncertainty, as a response to senders’ relationship building behaviors, mediate the relationship between senders’ relationship building behaviors and successful knowledge transfer. When senders are expatriates, senders’ communication patience and relationship building behaviors interact to reduce the direct and indirect effects of both receivers’ interaction anxiety and uncertainty. However, when senders are HCNs, the moderation and moderated mediation models are not supported.

The study contributes to the knowledge management literature by investigating knowledge transfer between expatriates and HCNs using an interpersonal cross-cultural communication lens. The authors make refinements to AUM theory by going beyond the sender role to highlighting the interdependence between senders and receivers in the management of anxiety and uncertainty which, in turn, influences the effectiveness of cross-cultural communication. The study is also unique in that the authors underscore an important yet understudied construct, communication patience, in the successful transfer of knowledge.

We examined who is more likely to use flexible work arrangements (FWAs) to alleviate work-family conflict (WFC) and under what conditions the use of FWAs actually reduces WFC.

We tested the model using survey data collected at two time points from 217 employees.

Proactive employees are more likely to use flextime to alleviate WFC (b = −0.03; 95% biased-corrected CI: [−0.12, −0.01]) and this mediation relationship is not moderated by their level of low work-to-nonwork boundary permeability. In addition, only when proactive employees have a low work-to-nonwork boundary permeability does their use of flexplace alleviate WFC (b = −0.07, 95% bias-corrected CI: [−0.1613, −0.0093]).

We expand our understanding of who is more likely to utilize FWAs by identifying that employees with proactive personality are more likely to use flextime and flexplace. We also advance our understanding regarding the conditions whereby FWA use helps employees reduce WFC by identifying the moderating role of work-to-nonwork boundary permeability on the relationships between both flextime and flexplace use on WFC.

The expatriation literature (a substantial domain of the International HRM literature) has not paid sufficient attention to the phenomenon of work engagement, which is essential for expatriate success. Equally, research on work engagement in Organizational Behavior, although extensive and mature, has neglected the context of expatriation. Our study bridges the two literature streams to examine the antecedents of expatriates’ work engagement within the distinct context of international assignments.

Through e-interviews with 27 Nordic assigned expatriates in 16 host countries, we delineate and organize antecedents of assigned expatriates’ work engagement in a framework.

We identify two clusters of antecedents – general and specific – characteristic of expatriate settings (e.g. distance to headquarters, pride in being chosen, culture, fewer distractions, success in a foreign context, adjustment, location, and language). We decompose each cluster into contextual and job-related antecedents leading to absorption, dedication, and vigor as three components of work engagement. We depict and organize the relationships in a framework.

Our qualitative study connects two bodies of literature that have remained largely independent of each other. In doing this, we contribute to the expatriate literature by presenting a comprehensive picture of antecedents to work engagement and the engagement literature by exploring engagement in a new occupational work setting, namely international assignments.

International Entrepreneurs (IEs) increasingly cross borders to internationalize their activities, yet the various motives driving them into foreign markets are insufficiently understood vis-à-vis the public agencies striving to attract them. Our study proposes a consideration of their interplay by contrasting the various mobility rationales of IEs with those of the investment agencies striving to capture their talent.

Empirically, we concentrate on firms selected for funding in the French Tech Ticket, a competitive program designed to incentivize international start-ups to set up business in regional clusters across France. Using a longitudinal qualitative approach, we conducted two separate rounds of semi-structured interviews with IEs, public agency managers, and incubator staff members using thematic analysis of participant narratives on mobility.

Our findings point to diverging narratives on mobility, with an overarching opportunity-centrism on the part of the entrepreneurs and a general location-centrism emanating from the regional agencies. These contrasting visions of mobility are not mutually exclusive but rather present along a mobility continuum that generates contrasting logics.

Implications for policy and practice are provided for the investment agencies crafting policies and committing resources to attract mobile international entrepreneurs. While past IE mobility may correlate with the likelihood of present and future movement, our dual settler-explorer continuum model demonstrates that a binary separation of explorers and settlers is too simplistic: explorers may be subject to settler impulses and settlers can still be drawn to exploration and nomadism. We also provide insights for IEs seeking support in their international development and mobility and the particular advantages a given host economy can offer by identifying an overarching proximity-to-distance rationale for explorers, including the common “host-as-stopover” intermediary rationale.

We theorize this incommensurability as an expression of the current complexity of international mobility and policymaking, revealing a “next-frontier” expansionism in cross-border movement that requires more deliberate consideration.

This paper shows the benefits of multi-sited ethnography for global migration studies in management, in particular when cosmopolitan self-initiated expatriates meet a local setting.

The author conducted a multi-sited ethnography to trace how a local East German research organization’s well-intended approach to integration becomes condescending.

Highly skilled non-Western migrant employees who represent English-language cosmopolitanism are framed as negatively “foreign” by corporate discourses and practices. This phenomenon can only be understood if one follows the interconnections of language power, White subalternity and compressed modernity and if one considers the immediate surroundings, the historical context of East German identity and wider migration frames in Germany.

Multi-sited ethnography, if power-sensitive and historically-aware, is suitable for understanding the multi-level phenomenon of global migration and identifying limiting framing-effects on management and organizations. Researcher standpoint is both its strength and its limitation.

Managers and companies can “imagine otherwise” and move beyond the unquestioned dominant frames limiting their problem analyses and, consequently, their strategies and actions.

Managers and companies are enabled to move beyond individual- and corporate-level approaches to managing migration at work and can thus take up full social responsibility in the sense of good corporate citizenship on a global level. Global mobility researchers can work towards an inclusive migration theory.

Multi-sited ethnography, in particular, one that is power-sensitive and historically aware, is an approach not yet applied to migration in the context of management and organization. By means of an example, this paper illustrates the value of this approach and enables researchers to understand its main principles. Compressed modernity and White subalternity are introduced as novel concepts structuring migration, and language power emerges as relevant far beyond the scope of the multinational corporation.