Cross-cultural adjustment of skilled migrants in a multicultural and multilingual environment: an explorative study of foreign employees and their spouses in the Swiss context

Abstract

Skilled migrants are essential to the global economy, and both employers and states depend on them to maintain their competitive advantage. This is particularly true for the Swiss economy, which attracts an impressive number of migrants to counteract the national shortage of skilled workers. The Swiss context is particularly interesting to study because of the strong presence of multinational companies and a situation where the difference between qualified migrants and assigned expatriates is increasingly ethereal. Our study focuses on the adjustment of a population of 152 foreign employees from Swiss-based multinational companies and the adjustment of 126 spouses. We studied different adjustment dimensions focusing on local language proficiency and relocation support practices. Despite the highly multicultural and multilingual Swiss context, our data analysis highlighted relatively low cross-cultural adjustment scores (especially interaction adjustment). We uncovered the degree to which relocation support practices are offered, used and perceived as necessary by foreign employees and showed which support practices could be used to improve the adjustment of migrants.

Keywords::

• cross-cultural adjustment
• international mobility
• local language proficiency
• relocation practices
• skilled migrants
• Switzerland

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Professor Nicky Le Feuvre (University of Lausanne) and our IP6 colleagues for their valuable comments on an earlier version of the article. We also thank the companies and the expatriates that participated to our research project and the International Link network for their valuable support. We are also grateful to the three anonymous reviewers and the guest editors of this special issue of the International Journal of Human Resource Management for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

This publication is part of the research works conducted within the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research LIVES – Overcoming vulnerability: life course perspectives, which is financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation.