Introduction
With the development of economy and technology, more and more enterprises have begun to go abroad and establish international companies. When the company explores overseas markets, in addition to recruiting employees locally, it also dispatches employees who are familiar with the company's business to the overseas branch (Dispatches Europe, 2016). Therefore, expatriates refer to the home country citizens or third-country citizens appointed by the parent company to work in the host country, as well as foreign citizens working in the parent company, including the home country citizens working in the host country (Kagan, 2019).
Usually, there are two primary purposes for the company to dispatches employees to work abroad: to reserve talent for global development or to meet specific purposes (such as specific business or technical needs) (Costa-Rising, 2018). Some experienced multinational companies such as InterContinental Hotels or Disney World send their employees abroad are mort due to the consideration of talent cultivation (Euht, 2018; Jobs.disneycareers.com, 2019). Except offering the positions in the management, those companies also would open some projects for overseas work to attracting and training new staffs and help them to build up their international skills quicker. With the rapid economic growth of some Asian countries led by China, the structure of expatriates has been changed from Western middle-aged married male staffs into a large portion of young Asian (Mayberry, 2016).
With the economic rise of some Asian countries led by China, the structure of expatriates has been from the former Western married middle-aged men's expatriates to the company's management, and more and more young Asians are now involved. ECA International, a global-local service company, pointed out in the 2016 Management Liquidity Survey that the composition of the typical expatriate staff has changed and Asia has become an equally important source of expatriate employees as Western Europe or North America (ECA International, 2016).
This trend is closely linked to the global expansion of Asian companies, with the overseas expansion of Japanese companies in the 1980s as a starting point. After the 2008 financial crisis, this trend was further strengthened with the addition of China (Ecb, 2011). Lee Quane (2018),head of ECA Asia Pacific claimed that Asian companies are more likely than Western companies to send employees to work overseas. Western companies may only have a small number of managers and then recruit employees locally. Asian companies tend to be stationed. More people, even junior staff. China is a clear example, but Japan and South Korea are the same. Their expatriates include middle and senior managers and even junior managers and professionals. Part of the reason is communication, but trust issues is another very important reason. Many Asian companies from China, South Korea, Japan and India have developed a staunch local talent plan by a global recruitment company Chapman CG. In other words, they hope to recruit talents from the motherland and conduct certain training before picking the best people to go overseas for senior positions. In Korea, overseas work experience is seen as a prerequisite for the promotion of top positions in large companies (Black and Gregersen, 1999). Meanwhile, in the mainland of China, the government has also called for the largest companies to expand overseas through a “going out strategy”, which has led to a series of mergers and acquisitions (Wang and Miao, 2016). Moreover, many Chinese companies open offices around the world. Most of the employees in these offices are dispatched from the Chinese headquarters (Pradier, 2018).
As the demand for Asian talent increases around the world, Asians are more willing to go abroad to expand their careers than before. Hays Asia, a global recruitment company, recently surveyed five Asian countries in which it found that Singapore has the most globalized mobile workforce, with 97% planning to work overseas. 85% among them who wish to find better jobs opportunities, career development and exposure through working abroad. Meanwhile, 96% of respondents are preparing to work overseas in the mainland of China and 94% in Hong Kong and 93% in Malaysia (Sampson, 2015). Overseas working experience could offer them global thinking simulation, international business operations experience, which helps them to obtain the unique advantages working in the international company after combine with the local cultural knowledge. This type of talents with sufficient cultural sensitivity can more effectively cooperate with people from different countries which is the characteristics hanker for the international company (Tesfaye, 2016). Moreover, Mr. Matthew Chapman (2018), the chairman of Chapman CG also believes that the talents who with overseas working experience are high demand in the market, especially in Asia, where economic growth is much faster than in Europe and the United States. Mr. Chapman also pointed out that people are paying more attention to the way they do things in Asia than they used to, and they also value the global leaders who once have lived or worked in Asia. Such talents can get quick promote as many companies are eager to absorb strategies from this region and idea.
The professional attitude is used to measure the behaviour of employees in their work, which usually called employee engagement (Mahipalan and Sheena, 2015). Employee engagement is considered to be a commitment and input of employees to the organization in emotional and behavioural. There already have many pieces of research that focus on how to promote employees engagement to increase their working performance. However, when the employee becomes an expatriate, how to manage their working performance and motive their best working engagement is worth to study. Moreover, most of the expatriates will not stay abroad permanently. Too short tenure may not be enough for them to adapt to the new environment and create value to the company. Too long tenure may also reject by the employee to willing to working abroad or take the risk of losing the talents after well trained. How to find a balance for the tenure for expatriates and find out the most suitable spots to motive their working engagement is a valuable topic to investigate both in the academic and international business field.
Research Aim, Research Questions and Research Objectives
This research aims to find out a best expatriate working tenure to increase working engagement of Chinese expatriates
To achieve this research aim, the research question will be designed as
Research question 1: Whether a clear expatriate tenure has a positive effect on Chinese expatriates’ engagement in their work.
Research question 2: Whether an unclear (extend or shorten) expatriate tenure has a negative effect on Chinese expatriates’ engagement in their work.
The following research objectives should be dressed to answer the research questions:
- Analyze the reasons that affect the engagement of expatriate employees;
- Investigate how the expatriate tenure is established;
- Analyze the impact of expatriate tenure design on the engagement of expatriate employees.
Preliminary Literature Review
From the previous studies (Hill et al., 2001；Major, Klein and Ehrhart, 2000), it is easy to conclude that expatriates may face culture conflict; language disability; racial discrimination; separate with family, etc. Moreover, all these difficulties may increase the work-life conflict. And reduce work enthusiasm. However, some part of the researches pointed out that working in a foreign country may be a big challenge. It also would be a special experience and an excellent chance to improve personal ability and increase additional skills (Kukk and Leppiman, 2016；Preskill, 2018). In some way, the chance of living and working in another country may become an extraordinary fortune in people live.
Secondly, after narrow the target group to the Asia or Chinese international company, many pieces of research show specific work-life conflict in this group of the expatriates (Gajendran and Harrison, 2007; Byron, 2005; Jones et al., 2008). Asia is a high collectivism country (Hofstede Insights, 2019). Therefore, the relationships between people are relatively closer than people in western country. Moreover, compared to European countries, which have similarity culture background, Asia has a totally different social and cultural background. It would be a huge challenge to this group of people to compete for work abroad and balance the work-life (Jeffrey Hill et al., 2004). Meanwhile, when selecting the candidates, many companies would choose the staffs who have study abroad background which to some extent can relief such stress.
Many research also focused on the difference in working performance of the staffs who are working in the country and working abroad (Lee and Kartika, 2014; Nunes, Felix and Prates, 2017). Working time; education; age; marital status; position and other relevant reasons all will affect the working performance. Among them, new staffs always show higher passion for their work but weak ability; on the country, the senior employee would be more loyal to the company meanwhile a bit slack to their work.
Some pieces of literature point out that retraining of expatriates is one of the critical means to ensure the quality of expatriates and to mobilize the enthusiasm of expatriates (Kugler and Sauer, 2005; Coupp and Vakhitova, 2013). The training of expatriates should focus on specific and comprehensive. It is necessary to comprehensively improve the comprehensive skills and overall quality of expatriates for training purposes, and combine the career planning of expatriates and the future talent demand planning of the company to determine the training objectives. Training programs and training assessments should not blindly carry out training for expatriates. Otherwise, it will increase not only the cost of human resources training but also the disappointment of the dispatched staff on the training expectations. It may lead to the transfer of behaviour, which in turn affects the enthusiasm of work. The training can be given in the parent company or during the time they are abroad.
Performance appraisal is the core content of human resource management. The appraisal indicators involved generally include four aspects: department KPI index appraisal, job work target assessment, employee workability assessment, and employee work attitude evaluation. However, some paper pointed out that the most important one in the management of expatriates is not the performance appraisal (Chhotray, Sivertsson and Tell, 2017; Pech, 2009). The quality of the work of the expatriates and the competence of the expatriates can be more intuitively reflected from the performance appraisal. Therefore, in addition to the regular assessment indicators, the performance appraisal indicators must also take into account the particularity of the assignment work, such as the ability to adapt to the environment, the evaluation of the resident company, self-evaluation, etc. The result is that through performance appraisal, the company can more accurately grasp the development direction and emotional dynamics of the expatriate employees, to timely, adjust the focus of the assignment management work, maximize the work engagement of the expatriates and create more value to the company development.
However, most of the expatriates are facing a situation that they would back to their home country one day. Therefore, the relationship between the length of the tenure to work abroad and expatriates working engagement has become an attractive topic worth to be studied. With more and more Chinese international companies sending their employees working abroad, it is necessary to fill the gap of this subject. Therefore, this paper will conduct in-depth research from this perspective, trying to find the best tenure to motivate expatriates working engagement. And provide valuable evidence for international companies to better stimulate the enthusiasm in limited time length of their expatriates.
Method
The aim of this paper is to explore the relationship between the expatriate tenure and the engagement of the expatriate Chinese employees. After that, the international companies can have clues to follow and deliver the most suitable expatriate tenure in order to motivate the employee to perform more engage the work, and build a more significant contribution to the company. Based on this research aim, it can tell that the research is going to use the interpretative paradigm epistemology to explore, understand and study the relationship between people and society. Interpretative paradigm is the most common epistemology used in social sciences (Salma Patel, 2015). The meaning of the research always is found through subjective personal experiences and feeling. The focusing point of the interpretive paradigm is the differences in society and seeks the answers or explanations to understand better of the world after the study (Sulaiman and Kura, 2012). Interpretative paradigm requires the placement of researchers in research scenarios, through interviews, observations, or symposia to carry out the research. The researcher will establish the theory in a given environment with a group of people to interact.
The target group of this paper is the Chinese expatriates and find out how they react to active engagement when offering different expatriate tenures. Therefore, ethnography this specific qualitative research method would be used in this paper. Ethnography is grounded under the ethnic; culture; religion and other features to explain the behaviour pattern to the target group (Reeves, Kuper and Hodges, 2008).
This paper will collect the research data through qualitative interviews, and organize and summarize them to find out the most reasonable answer to the research questions explored in the paper.
The size of the interview sample would be around 20 participants and they all coming from China. The candidates will be selected by age; gender; position; education background; occupation type; the expatriate country as the dimensions to select the interview participant. The interview plans to take around 20 minutes by semi-structured interview. It will be conducted in face to face; video interview; or online chat. Moreover, all the participants would be voluntary to join in the interview.
After the interview, all the transcripts will be browsed and labeled codes. The codes can be appeared in any of the transcripts and maybe link to other relevant theories or concepts. If necessary, some of the interviewees may be invited to do a second time interview for collecting the missing points or explaining the unclear parts.
After giving codes all the essential information from the interview transcripts, these codes will be classified into different categories. And try to figure out any hierarchy or important level among the categories and summarize the results.
All the data collecting and analyzing should be unbiased, creative and open-minded in order to increase its validity and reliability. All the participants for this interview are voluntary, and the content of the interview will be kept confidential.