Home Sweet Home Abroad : Understanding and Harnessing Job Embeddedness of The Internationally Relocated Workers
Authors:   , Nguyen Anh 
Published: August 2024

Encompassing employees’ interconnectedness with their communities, organizations, and career trajectories, job embeddedness serves as a potent predictor of crucial work outcomes for internationally relocated workers (IRWs). Despite its significance, current literature on the embeddedness of IRWs reveals several deficiencies, thus hindering its effective application in research and practice within this workforce. These limitations primarily stem from inadequate attention to cross-border relocation, thereby failing to differentiate the embeddedness of IRWs from that of native workers. In this thesis, we systematically examine the influencing factors, theoretical framework, and important outcomes of job embeddedness among IRWs, taking their distinct circumstances of international relocation into consideration. Four key papers constitute this thesis. Identifying factors influencing IRWs' community, organizational, and career embeddedness in their host countries, the first systematic literature review (SLR) categorizing them into four levels: situational, individual, organizational, and institutional. We scrutinize current research gaps and delineate directions for future studies. The second SLR focuses on the unique characteristics of job embeddedness among IRWs, highlighting intensified spillover and crossover effects, as well as transnationalism. These characteristics elucidate how IRWs establish connections with their new environment and expand the constellation of the job embeddedness concept. These conceptual foundations lay the groundwork for two empirical studies within this thesis. The first study employs a person-centered approach and latent class analysis (LCA) to identify different embedding types among IRWs while also examining the role of personal initiative (PI) in shaping these types and their relationships with retention intent. Results unveil four embedding types, namely, ‘host country community-focused embedders’, ‘home country community-focused embedders’, ‘host country career-focused embedders’ and ‘transnational embedders’. ‘Transnational embedders’ exhibit the strongest inclination to stay, followed by ‘Host country community-focused embedders’. Furthermore, PI is also shown to play a significant role in fostering transnational and host country embeddedness. The final empirical study focuses on a subset of IRWs—dual-earner expatriate couples (DEECs). Through the utilization of actor-partner interdependence model (APIM), we demonstrate that a partner’s community embeddedness mediates the relationship between their self-enhancing humor (SEH) and career satisfaction. Additionally, the effects of humor positively cross over to a partner's community embeddedness and career satisfaction, with a particular influence on female career satisfaction through deepening their connection with the host community. The contributions of this thesis are manifold. Firstly, the thesis offers conceptual insights enhancing the understanding of job embeddedness among IRWs, bolstering its applicability and guiding future research. Secondly, employing innovative methods such as LCA and APIM, it provides empirical evidence on two novel personal antecedents of job embeddedness—PI and SEH—along with their mechanisms underlying retention and career satisfaction among IRWs. Lastly, practical recommendations are offered for stakeholders, including HRM practices and policymakers, to effectively leverage and augment job embeddedness among IRWs.