Intelligences and expatriation

• Main Authors: Abdul Malek, Marlin Marissa, Budhwar, Pawan
• Format: Conference or Workshop Item
• Language: English
• Published: 2009
• Subjects: HD28 Management. Industrial Management
• Online Access: http://repo.uum.edu.my/4965/1/Marli.pdf; http://repo.uum.edu.my/4965/

This paper examines the relationship between the 'soft' skills of expatriates, Cultural Intelligence (CQ) and Emotional Intelligence (EQ) and the expatriate and their family members' adjustment in the Host country (HC) while on international assignments. It also investigates into the effect of Cultural Distance (CD) on the expatriates and their family members adjustment. Finally, it studies the impact of these antecedents (CQ,EC,CD) on the expatriate adjustment outcome variables of expatriate job performance (EP) and intention to remain on assignments (IR).Data were gathered ,from a field study both through postal and on-line surveys of the expatriates, their spouses/partners and co-workers in the Malaysian context.Overall, results from the 86 expatriate-spouse-colleague triads suggest a positive relationship between the EQ and CQ on the adjustment of expatriates and their family members.Positive adjustment also plays a positive role on the performance of expatriates and their intention to remain on assignments.Supporting the successful intelligence theory (Sternberg,1997), we found that cultural intelligence does have evidence on conforming cultural behaviour to the environment at the host country and organisations should include non-technical skills such CQ as one of the criteria that organisations look for in potential expatriates in order to perform better in non-technical responsibilities that comes with the expatriate role.