I believe that at the heart of every entry process, be it a new employee’s entry into an organization, a student’s entry into a new class, or an immigrant’s entry abroad, is a need for adjustment of the newcomer. In other words, whenever there is a change in environment, a need for fitting in arises. […]
The Expat Dilemma: Building New or Keeping Old Relationships
In one of my recent posts, I discussed the cases of expats visiting home, missing the familiarity of it and trying to balance between the ‘new’ (even if temporary) and ‘old’ homes. Continuing on this topic of this double expat life, today I would like to focus on expats’ relationships, and more specifically, their friendships. […]
Expat Homesickness: Is It really that Bad?
Are you an expat, who was assigned to a year-long project abroad, and who feels homesick? I believe, many will understand you. Or are you a spouse, who decided to leave your life back home to accompany your partner, and you feel homesick? Well, that is also quite normal. What if you are an expat, […]
Family Performance in Expatriation: About the Concept and Measurement
The role of the family in expatriation has been a long-standing topic in the field of global mobility. Many different sources highlight that the family has been and continues to be an important factor in expatriation. Indeed, according to the latest Cartus 2014 Global Mobility Policy and Practices survey, family challenges remain the top (61%) […]
Multilingualism: Multiple Personalities or Just a Diverse One?
Governed by the needs of globalization, I believe it is fair to state that multilingualism is becoming a MUST in the increasingly multicultural business world. Apart from simply possessing more than one language, multilingual individuals are usually more culturally competent (linguistic knowledge decreases cross-cultural barriers), have a more efficient brain (take a look here), and […]
Working in a Cross-cultural Environment: Where to Look for Cultural Gaps?
Multicultural, multinational, and multilingual teams are part and parcel of global organizations of today. This highlights the importance of cultural competencies, cross-cultural cooperation, and leadership of multinational teams. Indeed, the main question for many is how to do business and effectively manage in such a culturally diverse environment? Cultural competence: too broad to grasp? Well […]
When an Expat Visits Home: Caught Between Two Worlds?
In this blog I have written several articles about expats’ difficulties and challenges for the initial adjustment abroad, and also about the difficulties of repatriation. However, what has been less discussed in my blog so far is the time ‘in-between’, namely when the expat is visiting home during the international assignment. Are there any potential […]
Gender Bias on a Global Scale
Remember the last time you did something wrong or experienced a failure? How did you explain it? I bet you could have attributed many reasons to some sort of situational factors. For example, you could have failed to execute some work assignment on time due to having many other urgent tasks, right? Now, think of […]
The Return of the Expat Allowance
Given the recent focus on the economic crisis in financial news reporting, many headlines in the area of global mobility were about reductions of expat costs and, more specifically, of expat compensation packages. At the beginning of this year however, several sources predicted possible changes to the cost reduction orientation, arguing that talent scarcity will […]
Latest Research: What Makes One Cross-Culturally Competent?
One of the most important topics in the area of global mobility concerns the cross-cultural competencies (CC) that are required when abroad. Be it for the population of global leaders, international expatriates and inpatriates, their spouses and kids, or global nomads, we look for characteristics, abilities and skills that help people to adjust and function […]
Latest Global Mobility Highlights: Decrease in Long-Term Assignments
When talking about expatriation we tend to think primarily about traditional long-term assignments, which are two to three years in duration and imply an employee relocation to the host country. These are the assignments that we readily relate to attractive compensation and benefit packages, career enhancing moves, and profound cross-cultural experiences. However, in spite of […]
From Trailing Spouse to Career Chameleon: In Search of Identity
As human beings we all have a need to define ourselves, specify who we are, categorize ourselves in relation to others and find a way to present ourselves to the world. In other words, we all create personal identities, which entail the perception we have about our roles, interests, characteristics, relationships, and membership in social […]
Why Do Managers Behave in a Trustworthy Manner? Latest Research Findings
What is the meaning of interpersonal trust for organizations? A recent Forbes article argues that trust between managers and employees is foundational for their relationship and the management process overall. Echoing the importance attributed to trust in the popular media, trust is being increasingly studied also in academic settings. Making further contributions to existing academic […]
Empathic Listening: Listening or Simply Hearing?
As long as four decades ago American psychologist Paul Ekman boosted the study of human emotions and came up with what we know today as six basic and universally recognized emotions. According to Ekman’s and much of the following research, people universally show and are able to recognize the facial expressions of such emotions as […]
‘Us versus Them’ in Multinationals: The Case of a Lingua Franca
A couple of my previous blog posts related to the topic of adopting a dominant language, mostly English, in multinational corporations. Even though using a lingua franca is generally considered to improve communication, simplify information flows and increase collaboration across culturally different units of the company, some possible roadblocks need to be mentioned too. Specifically, […]
Inpatriates: On the Term and Academic Findings
Although both practitioners and academics in the field of global mobility are well used to the term expatriate, the term inpatriate is still in need of further presentation. Indeed, the latter is far less used in publications, and even Microsoft Word is still underlining it as an unknown or incorrectly spelled word :). As such, […]
