All pain, little gain? Reframing the value of international assignments

Global Mobility in the 21st Century

“…Benefits include the internationalisation of key managers to support a global strategy (e.g., developing cultural intelligence, language skills), increased organisational knowledge through effective "reverse" knowledge transfer, and an increase in firm-wide competitive advantage (Lazarova and Tarique 2005). While McNulty and Tharenou found "no empirical studies examining expatriates' ROI" (p. 89), their framework has been recognised by other scholars (e.g., caligiuri and colakoglu 2007; schmidt and Minssen 2007;collings et al 2009;Welch et al 2009) as a useful foundation for expatriate roI research.…”

“…In an important development, Welch et al (2009), in building on the McNulty and Tharenou (2004) framework, proposed an alternative conceptual approach to assessing the value ("ROI") from international assignments. They proposed that an intellectual capital perspective would "best capture the true worth -to organisations and individuals -of international assignments" (p. 1327).…”

“…Indeed, many practitioner-oriented reports (e.g., Johnson 2005, PricewaterhouseCoopers andCranfield University 2006), as well as academic publications (e.g., collings et al 2007; collings et al 2009), point to expatriate return on investment (roI) as an important business challenge which, when combined with the limited number of empirical studies available on the topic (for exceptions see schmidt and Minssen 2007;McNulty 2008;McNulty et al 2009;Welch et al 2009), demonstrates the need for more research in this domain. although interest in expatriate roI remains high, understanding as to how expatriate ROI is operationalised and managed in global firms is under-developed.…”

“…although interest in expatriate roI remains high, understanding as to how expatriate ROI is operationalised and managed in global firms is under-developed. Furthermore, Welch et al (2009) have pointed out that research on expatriate roI needs a strong conceptual framework.…”

“…The aim of this article is to contribute to current knowledge by presenting a new framework of expatriate ROI for global firms, which both builds on frameworks offered by McNulty and Tharenou (2004) and Welch et al (2009), and is informed by recent developments and emerging directions in global mobility research and practice. a second aim is to identify relevant questions to guide future research and to draw implications of the framework for theory, research, and practice.…”