Global mobility is critical to the success of multinational enterprises (MNEs), but we still know surprisingly little about how organizational structures affect the performance of globally mobile employees. Taking a much-needed structural perspective, HKUST’s Jiatao Li and co-authors shed light on how MNEs can best manage expatriate employees on assignment.

“The expatriation literature can be characterized as predominantly ‘expatriate-centric,’” the authors note, “ignoring the context in which such individuals are embedded.” To compensate, they deployed structural contingency theory, which emphasises the importance of fit between context and structure for an organization to perform well.

“This idea of fit at the organizational level has important downstream implications for expatriates who are sent by these organizations and are embedded within a specific international assignment context,” say the researchers, “as expatriates are embedded within multiple layers of contexts.” Their aim was to determine which combinations of structural characteristics have the greatest influence on the work of expatriate managers.

Analysis of survey data obtained from expatriate general managers at nine American global hotel chains revealed the “ideal” configuration: when decentralization (delegation of decision-making autonomy), formalization (rules and regulations), and global knowledge integration were high, expatriates were most committed to their organizations.

However, only under higher decentralization, higher global knowledge integration, and lower formalization (the “anarchy” configuration) was expatriates’ assignment completion intention at its strongest. This unexpected result may challenge previous assumptions about the need for formal controls and structured decision-making to ensure expatriate success.

The study’s findings have important implications for MNEs. “Adopting the wrong structural configurations may lead to company-sponsored expatriates leaving their assignment prematurely or leaving the company entirely,” the researchers warn. Instead, parent companies should balance the advantages and costs conferred by different structural configurations to maximize expatriate managers’ commitment to their organizations and intention to complete their overseas assignments.