DP2017-29

New Hiresʼ Job Satisfaction
Time Trajectory*
Ralf BEBENR OTH
Jose O.L. BERENGUERES

October 27, 2017
* The Discussion Papers are a series of research papers in their draft form, circulated to encourage
discussion and comment. Citation and use of such a paper should take account of its provisional character.
In some cases, a written consent of the author may be required.

1

As Rieb Discussion paper, Oct. 27th 2017

New Hires’ Job Satisfaction Time Trajectory

Ralf Bebenroth (corresponding author)
Professor
Kobe University
Research Institute for Economics and Business Administration
657-8501 Kobe-shi, Nada-ku, Rokko-dai 2-1
Japan
0081-78-803-7021
rbeben@rieb.kobe-u.ac.jp

Jose O.L. Berengueres
Assistant Professor
United Arab Emirates University (UAEU)
P.O.Box 15551, Al-Ain United
Arab Emirates
josetokyo@gmail.com

2

New Hires’ Job Satisfaction Time Trajectory

Abstract
This study is aimed at quantifying the job satisfaction trajectory of new hires. The
authors compared job satisfaction of 815 new hires to 1,925 remaining (non-new) employees,
asking all participating employees a simple question daily for ten months: “How happy are
you today at work?” With a full sample of 177.000 data points, we found high heterogeneity
in job satisfaction among employees from 12 different companies that participated in ourstudy. Also, supporting previous research, new hires started with very high levels ofsatisfaction compared to the remaining employees. The level of job satisfaction kept on
decreasing (until 64th day), continuing at a slower pace, gradually bottoming out around the
middle of the 7th month (195th day), when job satisfaction began an upward trend.

Keywords: Job Satisfaction Time Trajectory; New Hires; Acculturation theory.

3

New Hires’ Job Satisfaction Time Trajectory

1. Introduction
Analyzing job satisfaction of new hires is important because it can help organizations makeand implement appropriate policies to improve new employees’ emotional wellbeing (Orpen,
1986; Pulakos and Schmitt, 1983). Understanding the trajectory of job satisfaction of newhires can help companies develop strategies not only to improve performance but also toensure that new employees stay on to contribute effectively for a longer period of time. Thisis a critical issue in the “war for talents”, a term coined by McKinsey et al. (1998) to refer tothe competition and challenges of firms to attract high potential young elite at the upper
management level. Beechler and Woodward (2009) show that this does not only apply tohigher ranked employees. Therefore, firms are advised to not only ensure that new
employees do not quit, but also that they feel satisfied with their job in order to get thehighest return possible (Tsai, Wu, Yen, Ho, and Huang, 2005).
To the knowledge of the authors, there is not much research on detailed time
trajectories of new hires’ job satisfaction. For example, we do not know exactly at what time
an employee’s trajectory of job satisfaction changes. Especially important are the levels ofjob satisfaction at various points in time as decreasing levels might eventually lead to the
new hire leaving the company (Sanda and Adjei-Benin, 2011).
A study on changes in time trajectory was carried out by Boswell, Shipp, Payne, &Culbertson (2009) who provided a thorough background on job satisfaction of new
employees. Their research was based on a sample of 132 newly hired employees from apublic service sector organization located in southeast United States. They surveyed new
employees’ job satisfaction on three occasions (three month intervals). Feedback from thefirst questionnaire enabled them to compare job satisfaction of new employees, andsupported earlier research that job satisfaction of changing employees was higher at the

4

new firm than it was at the firm they had quit. The authors found that on average, job
satisfaction of new hires would have its highest point at the beginning (t=1), and from thenonwards, there was a gradual decline for the following three months, before it started toslightly increase from that plateau.
Employee job satisfaction is commonly evaluated by applying the Minnesota Satisfaction
Questionnaire (MSQ) with its long form covering 100 questions; the short form contains 20questions (Spector 1997). Boswell, Shipp, Payne, & Culbertson (2009) attempted toinvestigate this construct with fewer items in order to elicit a higher response rate from
employees. They measured job satisfaction using only three items, one of which was statedsimply: “All in all, I am satisfied with my job” (1: strongly disagree, 5: strongly agree).
In the present study, we aimed to throw light on the trajectory of job satisfaction of newhires on a daily basis. Based on the tenets of the Acculturation theory, we investigated thejob satisfaction of employees from 12 companies in various sectors. The job satisfactionlevel of new hires was compared to that of non-new employees. We investigated job
satisfaction using a computer application software downloaded to a mobile devise (an “app”)
to ask one simple question: “How happy are you at work today?” Our research design,
therefore, allowed us to ask all employees on a daily basis to assess their job satisfaction.
To the knowledge of the authors, this research design is novel and more precise in receiving
information than any other research undertaken so far on job satisfaction of new employees.
The paper proceeds as follows. The next section describes the Acculturation theory thatwill be used to investigate the fit of new employees to their companies. This is followed by
the Method where the sample and data are introduced. The Results are then presented. The
next section is the Discussion. Finally, in the Conclusion, the salient points of the study aresummarized.

5

2. Job Satisfaction and the Acculturation Theory
We investigated job satisfaction of new hires vis-a-vis that of the other employees (non-new)to determine the extent to which new employees acculturate to their new firm. Job
satisfaction is defined by Locke (1976) as "a pleasurable or positive emotional state resulting
from the appraisal of one's job or job experiences" (p. 1304).
Employee job satisfaction is an important topic that has been extensively investigated(Albrecht, 2006). Sanda and Adjei-Benin (2011) note that cultural role conflicts of employees
have a negative impact on job satisfaction. There is also evidence that higher job satisfactionof employees leads to more positive psychological outcomes such as a better commitment
or a better identity (Bebenroth and Ismail, 2016). Also, there is evidence that higher job
satisfaction leads to a lower turnover rate of employees (Coccia, 2001; Joshi and Goyal,2012). Not surprisingly, a common finding in expatriation research is that non-satisfied
expatriates quit their jobs more often than satisfied ones (Shaffer and Harrison, 1998;
Nauman 1993; Van Knippenberg and Schippers, 2007).
The so-called “why questions” soliciting reasons for job satisfaction or dissatisfaction
have been answered in the literature (Rusbult, Farrell, Rogers, and Mainous, 1988; Sanda
and Adjei-Benin, 2011). Early literature such as Pulakos and Schmitt (1983) indicates thatprediction of satisfaction is possible when one knows what outcomes the new hires
anticipate. Orpen (1986) examined the relationship between perceived task attributes of
employees and job satisfaction among 82 plateaued (having more than 7 years ofexperience at the company) and 130 non-plateaued managers (new managers). He foundthat job satisfaction of the plateaued managers correlated with four of the five task attributes
compared to that of the non-plateaued managers where such association was found with
only one attribute. Also, employee satisfaction was found to moderate the positive
relationships between stress and employees' use of assertiveness and coalition building(Zhang, 2017). Prior research also demonstrated the importance of both situational factors
and individual difference in determining employee attitudes toward their jobs (e.g. Gerhart,6

1987; Porter, 1962; Steel & Rentsch, 1997). Generational differences are also importantconsiderations in this regard (Saraf, Abzuri, Ishfahani, Fathi, 2016).
Acculturation is a cultural learning process experienced by individuals who are exposed
to, or have the need to integrate into a new culture or employment background. Acculturation
was investigated as early as 1936. Redfield, Linton and Herskovits stated: “acculturation
comprehends those phenomena which result when groups of individuals having different
cultures come into continuous first-hand contact, with subsequent changes in the original
cultural patterns of either or both groups” (p. 149).
The Acculturation theory originally proposes that when the integration process
between two groups starts, the original culture of one or both may alter having four possible
scenarios in the frame of cultural adjustment. This phenomenon can be investigated for ahome or a guest country (e.g. Tadmore, Galinsky and Maddux 2012). In assimilation,individuals from non-dominant cultures adjust entirely to the values of the dominant group. In
contrast, separation indicates the process in which individuals identify with their own culture
when they reject the values of the dominant group. Marginalization refers to minimal
identification with both cultures while integration shows double identification i.e. with theirown culture and with that of the dominant group. Chun, Organista, and Marín (2003) preferto think of acculturation as a more complex phenomenon or bi-dimension with interactive
perspectives instead of a unidirectional school of thought simply known as assimilation.
Chen, Benet-Martinez, We, Lam and Bond (2013) researched the psychological aspectsof bicultural integration. Guarnaccia, and Hausmann-Stabile (2016) researched acculturationfrom an anthropological angle. Acculturation also received attention from business andmanagement scholars whose findings have proven useful to human resource management(e.g. Samnani, Boekhorst and Harrison, 2012).
In our research, the Acculturation theory provides the framework for our investigation
since we hypothesize that new hires would have to adopt the culture of their company in7order to be job satisfied. We employ the Acculturation theory to gain insights into themultifaceted and often versatile interactions between new employees and their non-new
peers. The culture of an organization is defined by an overall combination of corporate
values, employee beliefs and norms (Appelbaum et al., 2007). The complexity ofacculturation is rooted in the fact that an organization comprises individuals and groups,
each integrated in networks of subcultures (Elsass and Veiga, 1994). The degree and rate ofacculturation varies among these networks, individuals, and subgroups, especially between
new hires and other employees.
It is important to note that not everybody experiences acculturation to the same degree(Nahavandi and Malekzadeh, 1988). Some researchers propose that disagreement with thedesired mode of integration leads to acculturative stress (Chun et al., 2003; Knilans, 2009).
As such, stress and tensions may lead to acculturative conflicts, also known as culture clash(Knilans, 2009). Culture clash is likely when people feel threatened by either the risk oflosing their accustomed way of doing things or when they face unfamiliar situations, e.g.
upon starting work at a new firm. An important intervention to avoid culture clash is having
structured and purposeful interaction between new hires and other organizational members
to nurture intercultural tolerance or, in other words, facilitating assimilation of new hires tothe culture of the firm that they have just joined (Schweiger and Walsh, 1990).
In the current study, all four modes of acculturation are applicable to new hires intheir adjustment to their workplace. In the case of an assimilation, new hires would fully
adopt the culture of the organization and hence, we would expect them to be job satisfied i.e.
their job satisfaction should be always high from the beginning to the end of the observation.
In the case of separation, new hires would either have left the previous firm because they
were not satisfied with their previous jobs, or they felt that the new firm offered better
opportunities. Such new hires would face a decrease in job satisfaction as time passed.
Even if new hires did not have any job experience before starting at the company, we still
considered them in the separation category when their job satisfaction declined. The

8rationale for doing so is that like other new hires who quit their previous firms, these new job
seekers had signed up at the company because they thought they had received the best
offer compared to other companies they had applied to. As regards marginalization, job
satisfaction should indicate a similar trend as that in the case of separation. Finally, withintegration, new hires should retain some of their old values acquired at the previous firms(cases of switching) but would still be able to accept the culture of the new firm and be job
satisfied, or at least retain the level of their job satisfaction as time passed.

3. Method
3.1. Sample
We used a sample of 815 new hires from 12 companies and compared their levels of job
satisfaction with 1,925 (non-new) employees. The data collection of the first firm started on
May 10th 2014 and the last collection ended on March 18th 2017. Hence the duration of theobservation period was about 2 years and 11 months. However, as each participant started
at a different time, there was an overlapping length of observation spanning a period ofaround 10 months. During the observation period, the daily job satisfaction level of new hires
was reported around 39,111 times. The full sample contained 177,000 data points. Based on
this data set, we traced the trajectory of new hires’ job satisfaction. We investigated thecritical time periods of new hires and their ups and downs of job satisfaction compared to theremaining employees.
The app to investigate job satisfaction was specifically designed to keep the identity ofusers anonymous. Therefore, to identify new employees, we applied an assumption. We
knew that even if the app was deployed by each company at different times, each participant
started to use the app immediately after its introduction. Therefore, we categorized “lateusers” in fact as new hires. In other words, after the app provider was deployed by thecompany, we noted that almost all users in the company used the app from the very

9beginning except non-users who absolutely declined to use it throughout the duration of thestudy. After the first week, the daily rate of first-time users decreased exponentially, tailingoff to a constant base level of users. Hence, we could confidently state that the base line offirst time "late users" was, in fact, a stream of new hires that started to use the app shortly
after their first day of employment at the company. A cut-off day was set up; any user thatstarted using the app more than 100 days later than the start of the service provided at thecompany was assumed to be a new hire. Hence, of the 2,740 users, we marked 815 users
as new hires because they started using the app for the first time 100 days after its
introduction in their respective companies. Initial interviews with some of the new hires
supported our assumption.

3.2. Data
Data were collected via an app which a consulting firm had installed in the mobile phones of
employees. The aim of the participating companies was to monitor their employees’ jobsatisfaction by obtaining feedback anonymously to improve the workplace environment sothat employees would find it an attractive place to work.
Daily responses were collected from employees at 12 companies in various sectors:
e-payment start-up, IT consulting services, retail, manufacturing, services, tourism, andeducation. About half of the companies were multinational (located near Barcelona) and theother half were Barcelona home-grown companies. Most of the users were Spanish
nationals, with 91% from Barcelona.
Employee self-reported job satisfaction was obtained in the following way. Once theemployee installed the app in their phone, the app would ask the employee on a daily basis:
How happy are you at work today? The employee was not asked directly about “jobsatisfaction” because the word “happiness” reads more naturally, especially for young newhires. When using the app, employees were presented with a screen that had a four icon-

10

face corresponding to a four-grade scale of 1 = sad, 2 = neutral, 3 = good, and 4 = great. By
design, all new and non-new (remaining) employees could only report their job satisfaction
stated as “happiness level” once a day. The default language of the app was Spanish. About
10% of the employees used the app every day and on average, employees completed the
response to the question every alternate day.
To quantify the job satisfaction trajectory of new employees, we used an exponential
decay model to regress the difference of job satisfaction between new employees and that of
the remaining employees on each observation day. We regressed employees’ data from thedifferent companies separately since pooling the data of different companies together would
have created noise. We already detected this phenomena in our descriptive analysis. To
support our arguments, in Fig. 2 we show the differences of two companies’ job satisfaction
trajectories, D and K.

4. Results
Table 1 shows the means and standard deviations of responses from all the participating
employees for the 12 companies. A four-grade scale was used to convert the scores into
categorical values. The minimum score (for the company with its lowest value) was 2.48 andthe maximum score (for the company with its highest value) was 3.47. For reference, themean value of all responses from new hires and remaining employees was 2.91. As per
Table 1, we can see that each company had their particular baseline (mean) with a relatively
high variability (mean from 2.48 to 3.47). In other words, depending on the firm, some had
employees with rather high job satisfaction while others pointed rather low. Also, employees
in the same company seemed to have very diverse response patterns, with a variability of
0.95 standard deviation. Apparently, global or company specific events could alter the job
satisfaction level of employees in non-uniform ways. For example, company specific events
only affected employees at a given company.

11

It was found that job satisfaction of new hires started higher than that of the remaining
employees but dropped faster thereafter, supporting only partly previous literature (Boswell
et al. 2009). To calculate the surplus, we subtracted the remaining employees’ jobsatisfaction from that of new hires in absolute and relative terms (at each company level,
Table 2). The line in Figure 1 is the surplus in job satisfaction between new hires and theremaining employees over time. The 95% confidence limits are shown in grey. On average,
a new employee started in the first week 0.17 points more job satisfied than the remaining
employees in his/her company. This surplus was highest at the beginning with almost 0.2
points difference. After 64 days of observation it dropped to almost the same level as to nonnew employees. After this point, the new hires’ job satisfaction was almost the same level asof that of the remaining employees. On the 195th day, job satisfaction of new hires reached
an absolute minimum of minus 0.017 points but after that, it reversed its falling trend andstarted increasing until the end of our observation period (300th day). The drop in the firstweek from the peak (day 0) had a zero-mean of 0.13. If we normalize the standard deviation(SD=0.64), the drop was 0.26, similar to the drop reported by Boswell et al. (2009) from the
3rd month the 6th month after the start (SD=0.25). Max to min distance score was 0.37 whennormalized by SD. This result was also similar to the so called “hangover drop” of 5% (0.2
points out of 4-point scale) reported by Boswell et al. (2009) between the 3rdmonth and 6thmonth.

5. Discussion
New hires started with relatively high job satisfaction compared to the remaining employees.
However, their high level of job satisfaction soon started to decline. Our findings, therefore,
supported the findings of other researchers, albeit with less frequent observations (e.g.
Boswell et al., 2009). We found on a more fine grained study design that already on the 64th
day, the job satisfaction of new hires dropped to almost the same level as the remaining

12

employees. This finding is more precise than others (e.g. Boswell et al. 2009). We also
found that the lowest level of job satisfaction of new hires was on the 195th day.
This study offers some theoretical insights. On the tenets of the Acculturation theory, we
showed that it was a challenge for new hires to acculturate to a firm. There was compelling
evidence that most of the new hires had trouble adjusting to their new workplace. Instead ofcultivating positive attitudes such as integration or assimilation, new hires tended to havenegative attitudes such as separation or marginalization in their new firms. There wastheoretical support that new hires’ job satisfaction declined gradually, bottoming out aroundthe middle of the 7th month (day 195th after the start at a company). This can be explained by
the fact that working in a company might be different from what was initially expected.
Difficulties in adjustment for new hires could be due to the work not being as interesting aspreviously thought, or not having anticipated the amount of pressure at the new workplace.
Interestingly, new hires’ job satisfaction improved approximately after the 7th month. A reality
in this trajectory, unfortunately, was that many new hires dropped out of their companies assoon as their job satisfaction decreased to the level of the non-new employees, i.e. they did
not stay longer than 7 months.
There was evidence that heterogeneity was high between new hires and remaining ones
and also among different companies (12 samples). Therefore, it might not be sufficient tofocus research efforts solely on a single company (Boswell et al., 2009). Also, it is notadvisable to mix new hires of different companies together to increase the sample size ascompanies differ in their characteristics (as reflected in our data set).
We also offer some practical implications. Managers should not make overly attractive
promises to their new hires that might be difficult to fulfil. We assume that the reason for thedecrease in job satisfaction may be due to the inability of new hires to adequately
acculturate to the new companies. The top management might have promised new hires toomuch at the job briefing or interview prior to their joining the company. Also, job seekers

13might have been misled by the company website and expect much more from the newcompany (Baker-Eveleth, Stone and Eveleth, 2016; Banerjee and Gupta, 2016).
Management should be sensitized that job satisfaction of their new hires is especially criticaluntil the 195th day. Until then, counter measures should be taken to arrest the falling trend of
job satisfaction of new hires so that they do not quit the firm prematurely.
Our study is not without its own limitations. Based on the results of our research, we canonly offer a time trajectory of new hires’ job satisfaction in contrast to that of the remaining i.e.
non-new employees. We do not know the actual reasons behind the changes inacculturation. Decisions of new hires depend on many factors that are beyond the scope of
this research. For example, the importance of the job for a new hire, or the tightness of thejob market may determine if a new hire makes an effort to integrate into the firm. A new hire
may also choose to separate from the company if he is lured by a more attractive offer fromanother company. In addition, global or company specific events can impact the job
satisfaction of employees differently. For example, a company specific event, like a
restructuring or a takeover might affect employees with varying seniority in non-uniform ways.
Younger and new hires may fear a job loss much more than experienced employees
because the firm would usually retrench younger employees (Bebenroth and Ismail, 2016).
Finally, the data set in this study contained valuable information of employees from 12
companies spanning several industries. The participants were relatively young, blue andwhite collar employees, entrepreneurial and from Barcelona or its surroundings. The generalbehavior of Spanish new hires as well as the remaining employees may not be generalizable
to employees in other countries. Also, Barcelona is a dynamic city and offers many
opportunities especially to young people. New employees may be tempted to switch jobs insuch an environment where international and entrepreneurial companies are hiring more
new employees than in other cities. With such a scenario in the job market in Barcelona, it
was not surprising that the 12 companies in this study were keen to extend their cooperation
in a job satisfaction study of their employees.

14

6. Conclusion
We have shown how the time trajectory of job satisfaction of new hires differs from that of
the remaining employees. Job satisfaction also exhibits a great variance across companies.
On average, we found support in our data for existing literature that new hires started withhigher job satisfaction compared to the remaining employees. This surplus of new hires’ jobsatisfaction was lost after roughly two months in our observation (day 64). It reached aminimum near the middle of the 7th month (day 195). Mean reversion started after that,
gradually leading to a somewhat higher job satisfaction again. In view of such a trajectory,
management should take counter measures to stabilize job satisfaction level of new hires,
especially during the first 2 months to keep the high performing new hires motivated and tocontinue not only to stay but also to be satisfied and more productive.

15

Table 1. Marginal Means and SD of New Hires and Remaining Employees in 12 firms

Max

Min

Mean

MedianN of employees participating per firm

572

34

182

144

Number of responses
All employees
New Hires
Remaining Employees

50k
19k
30k

153
21
132

11k
3.2k
10.8k

4.6k
388
5.8k

Job satisfaction
All employees

3.47

2.48

2.91

2.88

New Hires

3.90

2.63

3.05

2.95

Remaining Employees

3.36

2.59

2.89

2.84

All employees

1.15

0.54

0.93

0.934

New Hires

1.05

0.30

0.74

0.74

SD Remaining Employees

1.15

0.72

0.95

0.94

SD of Job satisfaction

Table 2: Absolute and relative Job Satisfaction (of all, new and remaining employees).

Month
of
reporting*Absolute job satisfaction

Relative surplus

All
Employees

New

Remaining

mean

SE

1

2.976

3.033

2.953

0.172*

0.008

2

2.931

2.942

2.926

0.035

0.008

3

2.877

2.931

2.858

0.025

0.006

4

2.853

2.968

2.814

0.028

0.007

5

2.856

2.945

2.828

0.005

0.007

6

2.834

2.864

2.825

-0.008

0.008

7

2.809

2.775

2.819

-0.016

0.009

8

2.77

2.843

2.754

-0.016

0.011

9

2.759

2.835

2.745

0.033

0.014

10
2.76
* average of the first week

2.809

2.752

0.076

0.014

16

Fig.1: Time trajectory of new hires’ relative job satisfaction in days
New hires’ relative
job satisfaction

days
The 95% confidence limits are shown in grey
Fig. 2: Examples of job satisfaction time trajectory at two companies, D and K

New hires at company D start with high job satisfaction (compared to non-new
employees) but decline; company K shows the opposite trend.

17

References
Albrecht, S. (2006). Predictors of employee extra-role performance and turnover intentions in
the public sector: An integrated model. International Journal of Human Resources
Development and Management, 6(2-4), 263-278.
Appelbaum, S. H., Lefrancois, F., Tonna, R., & Shapiro, B. T. (2007). Mergers 101 (parttwo): training managers for culture, stress, and change challenges. Industrial andCommercial Training, 39(4), 191-200.
Banerjee, P., and Gupta, R. (2016). Design deficiencies in corporate career web-sites inIndia: A content analysis. Human Systems Management, 35(4), 291-300.
Baker-Eveleth, L. J., Stone, R. W., and Eveleth, D. M. (2016). Job-pursuit intentions of online
job seekers. Human Systems Management, 35(3), 185-196.
Boswell, W. R., Shipp, A. J., Payne, S. C., and Culbertson, S. S. (2009). Changes innewcomer job satisfaction over time: examining the pattern of honeymoons and hangovers.
Journal of Applied Psychology, 94(4), 844-858.
Chen, S. X., Benet‐Martínez, V., Wu, W. C., Lam, B. C., and Bond, M. H. (2013). The roleof dialectical self and bicultural identity integration in psychological adjustment. Journal of
Personality, 81(1), 61-75.
Chun, M. K., Organista, B. P. and Marin, G. (Eds.) (2003). Acculturation: Advances in theory,
measurement and applied research. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Coccia, M. (2001). Satisfaction, work involvement and R&D performance. International
Journal of Human Resources Development and Management, 1(2-4), 268-282.
Elsass, P. M., and Veiga, J. F. (1994). Acculturation in acquired organizations: A force-field
perspective. Human Relations, 47(4), 431-453.
Gerhart, B. (1987). How important are dispositional factors as determinants of job
satisfaction? Implications for job design and other personnel programs. Journal of Applied
Psychology, 72(3), 366-373.
Guarnaccia, P. J., and Hausmann-Stabile, C. (2016). Acculturation and its discontents: A
case for bringing anthropology back into the conversation. Sociology and Anthropology, 4(2),114 - 124
Ismail, M., and Bebenroth, R. (2016). Organizational justice and organizational identificationof millennials in mergers and acquisitions: A conceptual framework. European Journal ofSocial Sciences, 51(4), 397-409.
Joshi, V., and Goyal, K. A. (2012). Stress management among bank employees: Withreference to mergers and acquisitions. International Journal of Business and Commerce,
1(5), 22-31.
Knilans, G. (2009). Mergers and acquisitions: Best practices for successful integration.
Employment Relations Today, 35(4), 39-46.
Li, J., Arya, D., Ha-Thuc, V., and Sinha, S. (2016) How to get them a dream job?. KDD '16
Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery
and Data Mining, 501-510. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2939672.2939721

18

Locke, E.A. (1976). The nature and causes of job satisfaction. In M. D. Dunnette (Ed.),
Handbook of Industrial and organizational psychology (pp.1297-1349). Chicago: Rand
McNally.
The McKinsey Quarterly (2008). How companies act on global trends: A McKinsey global
survey. Retrieved fromhttps://tice.agroparistech.fr/coursenligne/courses/24885/document/organizing%20for%20inte
rnational%20operations/HowCompaniesactonglobaltrends.pdf?cidReq=24885
Nahavandi, A., and Malekzadeh, A. R. (1988). Acculturation in mergers and acquisitions.
Academy of Management Review, 13(1), 79-90.
Naumann, E. (1993). Organizational predictors of expatriate job satisfaction. Journal ofInternational Business Studies, 24(1), 61-80.
Orpen, C. (1986). The relationship between perceived task attributes and job satisfaction
and performance among plateaued and nonplateaued managers. Human Systems
Management, 6(1), 15-20.
Pulakos, E. D., and Schmitt, N. (1983). A longitudinal study of a valence model approach forthe prediction of job satisfaction of new employees. Journal of Applied Psychology, 68(2),307-312.
Rusbult, C. E., Farrell, D., Rogers, G., and Mainous, A. G. (1988). Impact of exchange
variables on exit, voice, loyalty, and neglect: An integrative model of responses to declining
job satisfaction. Academy of Management Journal, 31(3), 599-627.
Redfield, R., Linton, R., and Herskovits, M. J. (1936). Memorandum for the study ofacculturation. American Anthropologist, 38(1), 149-152.
Sanda, M. A., and Adjei-Benin, P. (2011). How is the firm dealing with the merger? A studyof employee satisfaction with the change process. Journal of Management and Strategy,2(2), 28-33.
Samnani, A. K., Boekhorst, J. A., and Harrison, J. A. (2012). Acculturation strategy andindividual outcomes: Cultural diversity implications for human resource management.
Human Resource Management Review, 22(4), 323-335.
Akhavan Sarraf, A. R., Abzari, M., Nasr Isfahani, A., and Fathi, S. (2016). The impact ofgenerational groups on organizational behavior in Iran. Human Systems Management, 35(3),175-183.
Shaffer, M. A., and Harrison, D. A. (1998). Expatriates' psychological withdrawal frominternational assignments: Work, nonwork, and family influences. Personnel Psychology,
51(1), 87-118.
Spector, P. E. (1997). Job satisfaction: Application, assessment, causes, and consequences.
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage
Steel, R. P., and Rentsch, J. R. (1997). The dispositional model of job attitudes revisited:
Findings of a 10-year study. Journal of Applied Psychology, 82(6), 873-879.
Tadmor, C. T., Galinsky, A. D., and Maddux, W. W. (2012). Getting the most out of living
abroad: biculturalism and integrative complexity as key drivers of creative and professional
success. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103(3), 520-542.
Tsai, P. C., Wu, S. L., Yen, Y. F. Y., Ho, C. M., and Huang, I. C. (2005). Study of remaining
employees' continuance commitment after downsizing from the perspective of job

19satisfaction. International Journal of Human Resources Development and Management, 5(1),99-124.
Van Knippenberg, D., and Schippers, M. C. (2007). Work Group Diversity. Annual Review of
Psychology, 58, 515-541.
Zhang, R. (2016). In times of stress, be tough or be soft? Examining the relationshipbetween work stress and upward influence behaviour. International Journal of Human
Resources Development and Management. 16, (3-4), 196–218.