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Expatriates: The Process of Adjusting to a New Culture

Decent Essays

Expatriates are defined as individuals who relocate from one country to the other for at least one year (Littrell, Salas, Hess, Paley, & Riedel, 2006). Expatriate definition is different with short term visits because during a short term visit, individual is mentally aware that he or she is going back to home country, and also alert that it does not require as much adjustment as long term expatriation (Joshua-Gojer, 2012). Past researches have different views about adjustment and they have defined adjustment in terms of subjective wellbeing (Campbell, 1981) or unhappy feelings of expatriates about their circumstances (Munton & West, 1995). However, the most acceptable definition for adjustment was from Black (1988), he said that adjustment refers to psychological discomfort which can be categorised as work, general and interaction adjustment.

Black & Stephens (1989) classified expatriate adjustment into three-dimensions (i) general adustment– adjusting to living condition such as housing food, shopping, and other aspects of the foreigner culture, (ii) work adjustment– meeting job responsibilities or requirement and performance expectations, and (iii) interaction adjustment – socializing and speaking with host country nationals.

Selmer (2005) argued that these are the certain aspects of expatriate adjustment. According to Lee & Sukoco (2010), these three aspects of expatriate adjustment is to examine expatriate performance and effectiveness. In contrast, two

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