The Interactions Between Cultural Intelligence, Job Burnout, and Task Performance of Expatriates

Background

It is unquestionable that nowadays globalization gains more and more power than it did before. Every day companies search for new opportunities outside their origin country to maximize their profits. They search for new markets as well as penetrating in existing ones abroad. According to United States Bureau of Economic Analysis, US foreign direct investment raised from 1.32 to 6.01 trillion dollars in the period between 2000 and 2017. And sending employees for their operations abroad helped these types of companies to increase their foreign direct investments. From the human resources perspective, these employees who are sent by their parent companies to other countries in order to live and work at these host countries for a time period between two years and seven years, in general, are called as ‘expatriates’ (Caligiuri, 2000).

Throughout this process companies give emphasize on their expatriates’ adjustments to host countries. This is because when employees have difficulties in getting used to working at a host country, their job performance tends to deteriorate which in turn causes a decrease in organizational effectiveness (Liu and Shaffer, 2005). Besides there being many factors affecting an expatriate’s adjustment to a new country, at this point, cultural factors take the head. The rationale behind this is, expatriates’ facing these cultural factors firstly, and then learning and adjusting to them, since there are important differences from one country to another among the components of culture such as; values, attitudes, beliefs and norms (Van Vianen, De Pater, Kristof-Brown & Johnson, 2004).