Dynamics of the Global Careers Landscape
âEvery boring or mundane activity you experience at home is, when you move to a foreign country, suddenly transformed into an exciting adventureâ according to Reannon Muth, a travel writer. Indeed, it has long been known that some of the key drivers for global careers are adventure, excitement and learning (Hippler 2009; Doherty et al. 2011). While global careers and these worldwide talent management and knowledge flows are key ingredients for organizational success (Scullion and Collings 2011), our understanding of international work and careers has dramatically advanced in the last decades. This book outlines a vast array of recent insights into global careers and charts this dynamic field in order to allow global careerists and their families , multinational corporations (MNCs) and other key stakeholders to make better informed decisions. In so doing, the book moves beyond the basic insights depicted above to reflect the huge diversity of global career contexts and actors.
The âexciting adventureâ outlined above may not materialize in some situations and environments. Recent advances in our access and use of information, ease and lowered cost of travel and higher expectations in relation to what millennials expect from their working lives may mean that a move from Istanbul, Athens, Berlin or Paris to a shared service centre abroad results in a more administrative work embedded in a local city context that may not be seen as highly stimulating. Maybe this particular person has widely travelled and has experienced a phenomenon that The Economist, a news magazine, describes as many countries becoming relatively more similar. In turn, the relative âboredomâ that a person can experience may be highly preferable in the eyes of the individual to an assignment in a hostile environment context (Dickmann et al. 2017) where oneâs life is at stake. The world has increased in volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity in recent years which can make working abroad more exciting but more difficult, increases the need for flexibility and may be more dangerous for international workers (Bader and Schuster 2015).
Khilji and Schuler (2017) argue that global labour markets, talent flows, people living abroad in the diaspora and repatriates are key factors in the competitiveness of countries and organizations. The continued globalization trend, larger expatriate numbers (Brookfield 2016) and stronger migration flows (Al Ariss 2010), often encouraged through the push factors of hostile environments, mean that the ranks of global careerists are swelling. There is a massive âbrain circulationâ (Saxenian 2005) ongoing in the world. It is important to understand these different international talent flows in terms of key drivers, career types and gestalt, work and family effects, management interfaces and outcomes in relation to global careers.
Types of International Experience
International work appears in many different forms. International work experiences have typically been studied through the focus on certain type of assignment/assignee group. For example, clearly most of the studies in the field have focused on analysing the nature of long-term assignments within MNCs and thus the experiences of assignees who work abroad over several years. Later, there has been increasing interest towards those people who have self-initiated their long-term international assignments, that is, they have not been sent abroad by any organizations but instead the individuals arrange a job abroad on their own. Clearly less research attention has been given to short-term assignments or commuter assignments though in practice those are seen to be increasingly popular within companies. In the next section, we will briefly introduce the specific features of different types of assignments as they appear in the literature. After this, we will also take a more long-term perspective on global careers that often consist of various international assignments of different kinds during oneâs career.
Assigned Expatriates (AEs)
Tharenou (2015) defines AEs as managers and professionals assigned or sent abroad by their employer, who supports and funds the move, to work on an assignment temporarily for a pre-set period of more than a year to achieve organizational goals. Organizational reasons for the use of global mobility and AEs include the filling of a local competency gap (maybe there are no adequate candidates on the local labour market), a drive to have a high level of corporate (reporting and planning issues, other standardized approaches) and cultural integration (attitudes and behaviours) around head office ideas and the global management of talent including leadership development (Edström and Galbraith 1977; Stahl et al. 2002). Further organizational drivers include other operational (knowledge transfer) and political considerations (getting rid of a local competitor) outlined in various writings (Tharenou 2015; Dickmann and Baruch 2011). Of course, AEs have their own set of individual drivers to seek and accept working abroad. These include a large range of motives that have been outlined by various writers such as Dickmann et al. (2008) or Hippler (2009). Broadly speaking, individuals consider a large set of factors when deciding whether and where to work abroad. These fall into categories such as career and development, individual drivers such as a sense of adventure, family and friends, organizational inducements, national, regional and location-specific factors (Dickmann and Mills 2009).
Going on assignment on behalf of an organization typically creates a mutual or dual dependency between individuals (including their families) and their employers (Larsen 2004). When AEs are sent from the head office to a foreign subsidiary, in reality, much of the time when AEs go anywhere abroad, they tend to become a âbigger fish in a smaller pondâ or, sometimes, simply a more colourful fish in the sea. They often experience objective career advantages such as more rapid promotion, better performance evaluations and higher pay (Doherty and Dickmann 2012; The RES Forum 2017) in the short and long term. Thus, they have often become more costly and more important to their organizations. In turn, they normally rely on their organizations more strongly in terms of physical moves to the new country, pre-departure preparation, post-arrival support, childrenâs educational provision, housing, health care, tax and residence/working permit compliance and social security payments (The RES Forum 2016). Especially where AEs encounter highly different national contexts, extreme insecurity/terrorist threats and potential natural and human-caused disasters, the dependence of expatriates on their employers is likely to be very high (Bader et al. forthcoming).
To capture a large array of organizational activities to manage this dual dependency, Harris et al. (2003) developed the concept of expatriate cycle. This takes account of strategic and operational global mobility issues that are relevant before an AE is selected to work abroad, during and after the assignment. Dickmann and Baruch (2011) expand this discussion and centre it around global careers, the focus of our book. The focus of much (global) career writing has shifted to the individual careerist (Briscoe and Hall 2006; Gunz and Peiperl 2007; Sullivan and Baruch 2009). A lot of pertinent information is available to the reader and is, to an extensive extent, outlined in the following chapters of this book. Therefore, we will concentrate on a short depiction of organizational considerations and activities when managing their assignee populations.
Our discussion will focus on general global mobility considerations, resourcing, talent, career and performance management activities, reward and compliance issues as well as programme management, data analytics and global mobility technology approaches. While some of these issues are based on academic writings (Dowling et al. 2008; Dickmann and Baruch 2011), there are others that spring from the strong interest of the professional audience (see The RES Forum 2016, 2017).
General Global Mobility Considerations
It is argued that organizations need to consider their general assignment strategy and what they want to achieve with their global mobility activities (Edström and Galbraith 1977; Harris et al. 2003). It is clear that any international HR strategyâand by extension a global talent management and mobility approachâwould benefit from an integration with the MNCâs worldwide configuration of business strategy, structure, policies and practices (Bartlett and Ghoshal 1989; Dickmann and MĂŒller-Camen 2006). Once the vertical alignment is achieved, the role of the global mobility (GM) function can be deter...