Expatriate academics: job factors and work outcomes

The literature on business expatriates has been increasing rapidly, but research on expatriate academics has remained scant, despite the apparent increasing globalisation of the academic world. Therefore, more research is needed on the latter group of expatriates. This paper aims to fill some of the gaps.

A questionnaire was directed electronically towards expatriate academics occupying regular positions in science faculty departments in universities in northern Europe.

Results showed that job clarity was the dominating job factor with strong relationships with all of the five investigated work outcome variables, work adjustment, work performance, work effectiveness, job satisfaction, and time to proficiency. Job conflict and job freedom had an association with some of the work outcome variables but not with all of them. Neither workload nor job novelty had a relationship with any of the work outcome variables of the expatriate academics.

The paper shows that the findings are only partly consistent with previous research results concerning business expatriates, suggesting that the work situation for expatriate academics could have both similarities and discrepancies as compared to that of business expatriates.