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Compared to wholly owned subsidiaries (WOSs), certain international organizational forms such as international joint ventures (IJVs) often fail. Moreover, associated expatriations to these organizational forms also regularly fail, which contributes to or exacerbates the problem described above. To address this issue, this article aims to investigate the effect of expatriates’ role conflict on their desire to terminate an international assignment and on venture performance, measured as managerial satisfaction, by comparing expatriates who are delegated to an WOS with expatriates who are delegated to an IJV.

Drawing on role theory, a vignette-based experimental study was conducted with role conflict and organizational form as experimental variables. After conducting two pilot studies, data were gathered by means of an online questionnaire targeting organizational assigned expatriates (AE) for the main study.

The results indicate that role conflict negatively influences managerial satisfaction with venture performance, but has no effect on expatriates’ desire to terminate an international assignment and show no moderating effect of the organizational form. Additionally, we found a significant direct effect of organizational form on managerial satisfaction with venture performance. Hence, participants were less satisfied with IJVs compared to WOSs.

Studies in international business research lack experimental investigations. This article addresses this deficiency for the presented topic by applying a vignette-based experimental approach, thereby drawing causal inferences. Moreover, we extend role theory to the context of IJVs and contribute to organization research, as this article is the first to make a comparison between WOSs and IJVs for the context of role conflict. Fertile opportunities for future re-search are also provided.