Expatriates Adjustment in Creative Culture
Loading...
Date
2018
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
UMT.Lahore
Abstract
With the globalization of businesses which pose challenges for the businesses to expand
globally. In the realm of globalization, organizations have no choice but to compete in the
emerging marketplace. This demand organization to send their employees on the international
assignments as expatriates. Meanwhile, self-initiated expatriates also increase their travel and
movement at the global level which are defined as self-initiated expatriates. In this regard,
expatriates face challenges to penetrate in the new cultural settings which are different from
their home country culture. This study aims to explore the challenges and problems that
expatriates face in the creative culture on creativity front when they move from less creative
culture, Asian culture, to the high creative culture. This study also aims to highlight the
strategies that expatriates adopt to break their rigid mental schemas intentionally. Narrative
research design is being used whereby 7 participants are selected for the interview purpose.
Purposive sampling technique is used for this study and two phase coding cycle is used to
conduct analysis. The results of the study highlights three potential challenges that expatriates
confront in the creative cultural settings such as lack of self-confidence, inflexible mental
orientation and poor information handling. To overcome these challenges, expatriates adopt
some strategies including equanimity, amicability and cognitive adaptability that help them to
adjust in the creative culture by minimizing the pain of cross-cultural adjustment. Significance
of this study is to add value towards the literature, robustness of the theory and to extend the
practical work by providing a framework to the organizations so that they can reduce the rate
of repatriation by focusing on these influential challenges and strategies during their
adjustment process in the creative culture.