The relationship between expatriates' personality traits and their adjustment to international assignments

By Tsai-Jung Huang, S. Chi, John J. Lawler. 2005

287 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This study investigates the relationship between personality traits of expatriates and their adjustment to international assignments. We focused in particular on the Big Five personality traits: extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness to experience. We sampled eighty-three US expatriates in Taiwan and found statistically significant relationships between expatriate adjustment and three personality traits in theoretically reasonable directions. Specifically, our results showed that a US expatriate's general living adjustment in Taiwan is positively related to his or her degree of extroversion and openness to experience. We found that extroversion and agreeableness are both positively related to interaction adjustment (i.e. relationships with local people). Furthermore, a US expatriate's work adjustment is positively related to his or her openness to experience. Unlike prior research on expatriate adjustment, we have examined multiple traits rooted in personality theory, and we have derived hypotheses that are specific to a Chinese context.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Communication, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5370a511ed58d53d4b30197761bf22be4f78d78d

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Clinical Psychology

1. A. Koveshnikov
2. Naresh Kumar
3. Jegak Uli
4. Cécile Déjoux
5. Raduan Che Rose
6. Michele J. Gelfand
7. Mark I. H. Hwang
8. Vesa Peltokorpi

In Communication

1. Michele J. Gelfand
2. Miriam Erez
3. A. Koveshnikov
4. Naresh Kumar
5. Jegak Uli
6. Cécile Déjoux
7. Raduan Che Rose
8. Mark I. H. Hwang

In Social Psychology

1. Michele J. Gelfand
2. Miriam Erez
3. Z. Aycan
4. A. Koveshnikov
5. Naresh Kumar
6. Jegak Uli
7. Cécile Déjoux
8. Raduan Che Rose

Citations in the corpus

• Cross-cultural adjustment of expatriates: The role of emotional intelligence and gender (2014, background): “Supporting this argument, Huang et al. (2005) found that openness to experience among expatriates is positively related to their general living and work adjustment.”
• Personality traits and simultaneous reciprocal influences between job performance and job satisfaction (2014, background): “Meanwhile, Hurtz and Donovan (2000) showed that conscientiousness is positively relative to job performance in a meta-analysis.”
• Expatriate performance in international assignments: The role of cultural intelligence as dynamic intercultural competency (2010, background): “…criterions to measure expatriate effectiveness in international assignments: cross-cultural adjustment (Hechanova, Beehr, & Christiansen, 2003; Huang et al., 2005), premature return intention (Caligiuri, 2000a; Shaffer, Harrison, Gregersen, Black & Ferzandi, 2006) and job…”
• Cross-cultural organizational behavior. (2007, background): “Interaction adjustment and general/ cultural adjustment were found to be positively correlated with extraversion, agreeableness, openness to new experiences (Huang et al. 2005), and native language competence (Bhaskar-Shrinivas et al. 2005).”
• Cross-cultural adjustment of expatriates in Japan (2008, background): “This may be a reason why general personality scales, such as the Big Five, not developed for this research domain have been used (Huang et al. 2005).”