No abstract

This study described the various ways that newcomers proactively attempt to gain feelings of personal control during organizational entry and examined their longitudinal effects on self-reported performance and satisfaction in a sample of organizational newcomers. The results suggest that individuals engage in proactive activities such as information and feedback seeking, relationship building, job-change negotiating, and positive framing during entry and that individual differences in desired control were related to 6 proactive entry tactics. However, only some of these tactics were related to self-reported performance and job satisfaction.

Past international human resource management literature has suggested that most American multinationalfirms that employ expatriate managers have difficulty successfully retaining these managers in overseas assignments. Although some scholars have suggested that the inability of the spouse to adjust is one of the major reasons expatriate managers return early from their overseas assignments, few researchers have attempted to verify empirically a relationship between the spouse's adjustment and the adjustment and intentions to stay or leave of the expatriate manager. This study found that a favorable opinion about the overseas assignment by the spouse is positively related to the spouse's adjustment and the novelty of the foreign culture has a negative relationship with the spouse's adjustment. Additionally, the adjustment of the spouse is highly correlated to the adjustment of the expatriate manager and the adjustment of the spouse and the expatriate are positively related to the expatriate's intention to stay in the overseas assignment.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Academy of Management is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Academy of Management Review.Primarily because of the significant rate and costs of failed international assignments, the attention paid by scholars to the topic of international adjustment has increased recently. Unfortunately, most of the work has been without substantial theoretical grounding. In an effort to move toward a theoretical framework for guiding future research, this article integrates theoretical and empirical work of both the international and the domestic adjustment literatures. This integration provides a more comprehensive framework than might be obtained from either of the literatures alone. Academy of Management Review April work has been conducted in the area of international adjustment of expatriates-the existing literature consists mostly of anecdotal or atheoretical empirical efforts to understand the phenomenon (Adler, 1983; Kyi, 1988; Mendenhall & Oddou, 1985; Schollhammer, 1975).Conversely, the literature in the area of domestic (U.S./Canada) transfers and adjustment is much richer theoretically; researchers in this area have increasingly focused their efforts on understanding how an individual adjusts to a new organizational setting either after a transfer or upon initial entry into the firm . To date, scholars in the area of international human resource management have not utilized the domestic adjustment literature in order to formulate theories or models that would assist them in understanding the international adjustment process.Perhaps this has not occurred because although the theories of adjustment of employees to new organizational settings in the domestic context may have some application to adjustment in the international context, there seem to be substantial differences between domestic and international (or cross-cultural) adjustment. For example, most domestic adjustments do not involve significant changes in the nonwork environment; living in Los Angeles versus New York may be quite different in many ways, but the language, cultural, economic, social, and political contexts are significantly familiar. This is not the norm for international adjustments. Moving from the United States to a foreign country often involves changes in the job the individual performs and the corporate culture in which responsibilities are executed; it can also involve dealing with unfamiliar norms related to the general culture, business practices, living conditions, weather, food, health care, daily customs, and political systems-plus facing a foreign language on a daily basis.Because the work as well as the nonwork contexts usually change during an international ad...