Why do they go? Empirical evidence of employees' motives for seeking or accepting relocation

Abstract

This study addresses one of the shortcomings apparent in previous research on expatriate job-transfers, namely the lack of exploratory, empirical groundwork into the motives of expatriates to seek or accept international assignments. The relocatee population of a large German MNC was surveyed for their motives to seek or accept their transfer, using an open-response format. Responses were content analysed in order to arrive at an empirically grounded set of motives. The findings provide a very detailed picture of employees' motives to seek or accept international assignments and thus an important interim result that, when used as input in subsequent investigations, promises highly relevant results due to established content validity.

Keywords:

• expatriates
• international assignments
• motives for relocation

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 34th Annual Conference of the Academy of International Business (UK & Ireland Chapter) in London in 2007. The author is grateful to the editors, David G. Collings and Hugh Scullion, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful and developmental comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Notes

1. Sample characteristics are available upon request.

2. Recording units describe ‘the specific segment of content that is characterized by placing it in a given category’ (Holsti 1969, p. 116). For the purpose of the present study the recording unit was the motive.

3. Inter-coder reliability coefficient R = (2M/(N₁ + N₂)) with

M = Number of coding decisions on which the two coders are in agreement

N₁ = Number of coding decisions made by coder 1

N₂ = Number of coding decisions made by coder 2