Willing to go the extra mile: Understanding work engagement among expats

In recent years, many companies have been focusing on work engagement as a more positive way of working with employees towards business success. Work engagement has proven to be very valuable for organisations, but it has hardly been investigated in an international setting[i]. With a new study I’m conducting together with Mette Strange Noesgaard of Ålborg University, we would like to learn more about how expats experience work engagement while living abroad.

What is work engagement?
Work engagement is defined as “a positive, fulfilling, work-related state of mind that is characterized by vigor, dedication, and absorption”[ii]. In other words, engaged employees tend to exhibit high level of energy, being completely immersed in their work and show high level dedication to their work they perceive as meaningful. Engaged employees have been associated with important organizational level outcomes. Among others, work engagement is often reflected in lower turnover intentions[iii], better business-unit performance[iv], organizational citizenship behavior[v] and higher levels of profit[vi].

Why this focus on work engagement of expatriates?
Expats are ‘expensive people in crucial positions’[vii]. They are often at strategically important positions, and there are high direct and indirect costs associated with their assignments. A multinational depends in a high degree on expats’ willingness to invest themselves in their work, be active and perform their best on their own initiative due to the distance between headquarters and the location where the expat is posted. Expats need to be engaged to be successful, and, thereby, contribute to the success of the organization.

First findings
We have now e-interviewed 27 assigned expatriates about the factors that influence their work engagement. Thanks to those who participated in this process!

We learned a lot about what creates work engagement when you are on an international assignment. We found several factors that influence work engagement but are unique to the expatriate experience, for example ‘being out of sight out of mind’, culture, but also the location and the language. One interesting finding was that being abroad often meant fewer distractions and, therefore, more absorption in the work.

Picture of the walking man by David Reid and of the pavement by Ann Lusch, via Flickr.

Sources

[i] Lauring, J., & Selmer, J. (2015). Job engagement and work outcomes in a cognitively demanding context: The case of expatriate academics. Personnel Review, 44(4), 629-647

[ii] Schaufeli, W. B., Salanova, M., González-Romá, V., & Bakker, A. B. (2002). The measurement of engagement and burnout: A two sample confirmatory factor analytic approach. Journal of Happiness Studies, 3(1), p. 74

[iii] Maslach, C., Schaufeli, W. B., & Leiter, M. P. (2001). Job burnout. Annual Review of Psychology, 52(1), 397-422. doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.52.1.397

[iv] Harter, J. K., Schmidt, F. L., & Hayes, T. L. (2002). Business-unit-level relationship between employee satisfaction, employee engagement, and business outcomes: A meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87(2), 268-279.

[v] Rich, B. L., Lepine, J. A., & Crawford, E. R. (2010). Job engagement: Antecedents and effects on job performance. Academy of Management Journal, 53(3), 617-635.

[vi] Xanthopoulou, D., Bakker, A. B., Demerouti, E., & Schaufeli, W. B. (2009). Work engagement and financial returns: A diary study on the role of job and personal resources. Journal of Occupational & Organizational Psychology, 82(1), 183-200

[vii] Brewster, C., Bonache, J., Cerdin, J.-L., & Suutari, V. (2014). Exploring expatriate outcomes. The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 25(14), p. 1921. doi:10.1080/09585192.2013.870284