How and when do prior international experiences lead to global work? A career motivation perspective

Abstract

While research suggests a link between individuals' prior international experiences and their future participation in global work, we know little about how and the conditions under which this relationship occurs. Drawing on career motivation theory, we conceptualize global identity as a mediator between individuals' density of prior international experiences-defined as the extent to which time spent in culturally novel countries has provided individuals with developmental opportunities-and their global work aspirations, which in turn leads to their global work involvement. Further, this multi-stage mediation model holds mainly when individuals receive positive feedback regarding their intercultural competencies (i.e., cultural intelligence) from their peers. We test our model using a multi-wave multi-source dataset spanning 6 years.We discuss implications for the literatures on prior international experiences and global careers.

Guest editorial: Careers of self-initiated expatriates: exploring the impact of context

“…Similarly, the need for future research on re-expatriation situations has been emphasized (e.g. Akkan et al ., 2022). It has been discussed in the discourse that such decisions may be impacted both by pull factors (e.g.…”

“…As global work experiences are demanding and transitional experiences for individuals (Kraimer et al ., 2022), there has been interest in understanding what kind of impacts they make on individuals' identity. It has been reported that global careerists develop a global career identity (Akkan et al ., 2022; Suutari and Mäkelä, 2007), e.g. they also are often highly committed to working in global career environments in the future, view their job markets as global and constantly are looking for new challenges and development opportunities.…”

“…All these studies emphasize the importance of different contextual factors that relate to jobs, organizations and home and host countries in global careerists' decision-making on their careers. However, our understanding of the connections between previous expatriation experiences and future global work involvement remains limited (Akkan et al ., 2022). Overall, future studies should pay more attention to holistic career journeys in which people often move frequently between different international positions (McNulty and Vance, 2017; Suutari et al ., 2012).…”

“…Furthermore, expatriation studies should also pay attention to how career experiences both abroad and during repatriation impact re-expatriation intentions and future global mobility, leading to long-term global careers (Mello et al ., 2022). Furthermore, studies linking expatriate experiences and global work-related outcomes predominantly have investigated the direct effect of such experiences, thereby overlooking intermediate variables' potential explanatory influence (Akkan et al ., 2022).…”