Do Overwhelmed Expatriates Intend to Leave? The Effects of Sensory Processing Sensitivity, Stress, and Social Capital on Expatriates' Turnover Intention

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/emre.12120
• Published date: 01 September 2018
• Date: 01 September 2018

Do Overwhelmed Expatriates Intend to

Leave? The Effects of Sensory Processing

Sensitivity, Stress, and Social Capital on

Expatriates’Turnover Intention

MAIKE ANDRESEN,PAUL GOLDMANN and ANNA VOLODINA

Human Resource Management, University of Bamberg

Expatriates need to dealwith numerous stimuli resulting from new environmental andcultural influences abroad,

contributing to stress and high rates of failure and turnover. Based on conservation-of-resources theory, this study

aims to explorethe role of resources(including sensory processing sensitivity (SPS) and socialcapital) in explaining

expatriates’perceived stress and turnover intention. This is the first study to examinethe personality trait SPS in the

field of expatriate management. High-SPS individuals tend to be easily overwhelmed by novel stimuli. Based on a

dataset of 311 expatriates, structural equation model (SEM) and mediation analyses proved full mediation of the

positive relation between SPS and turnover intention through perceived stress. Moreover, stress fully mediated the

negative relation between bonding social capital and turnover intention. While 20% of the domestic population are

assumed to show high SPS, we found a 26.4% ratio in our expatriate sample. Implications for both management

and research are derived.

Keywords: sensory processing sensitivity;turnover intention; stress;social capital; conservation-of-resources theory

Introduction

While variousdefinitions of the expatriationconcept exist,

they all have the expatriate’s deployment in a foreign

country in common (e.g., Andresen et al., 2014). Getting

along in a new country can be both challenging and

emotionally demanding to expatriates for several reasons

(e.g., Caligiuri, 2000 ; Haslberger et al., 2013). For

instance, an expatriate is exposed to unfamiliar and often

unknown environmental influences (Bhaskar-Shrinivas

et al., 2005), has to adjust to a different culture, including

a foreign language and different behaviors, core values,

beliefs, customs, rituals, and, therefore, needs to establish

new social ties in order to get access to information that

helps to adapt successfully (Bhatti et al., 2013).

Insufficient cross-cultural adjustment has been shown to

be a main reason for most premature returns of expatriates

(Bhanugopan and Fish, 2006) and for turnover intentions

during assignments (Ritchie et al., 2015). A Deloitte

survey (2012) found that in 64% of the 77 organizations

surveyed, less than half of assignments terminate

prematurely, with employee adaptation problems being

causal for 28% of the early terminations.

1

Early

terminations not only cause direct (up to US$ 1 million

per expatriate failure; for an overview see Vögel et al.,

2008) but also indirect costs (e.g., damaged relations to

the host country’s customers, loss of business

opportunities; Shen, 2005; Kataria and Sethi, 2013) for

organizations.

In view of the costs resulting from turnover during

international assignments, knowing more about its

antecedents seems to be valuable for international human

resource management to derive counteractions.Within the

domestic context, Zimmerman (2008) meta-analytically

showed that (‘bright’sides of) personality traits influence

the individual’s tur nover decision an d behavior. Woo

et al. (2016) found that the‘dark’side of personality traits

might be at least equally informative as their ‘bright’side

in predicting turnover outcomes.

Correspondence: Maike Andresen, University of Bamberg,

Feldkirchenstraße 21, D-96045 Bamberg, Germany, Tel: +49 951 863

2570, Fax:+49 951 863 5571. E-mail Maike.Andresen@uni-bamberg.de

1

Please note that surveys as KPMG (2015) found an early termination rateof

less than 5% in most companies, however, they explicitly asked for

organizational reasons (bad performance) to relocate the assignee back home

or to dismiss him/her.Turnover or termination initiated by the assignee were

not part of the study.

European Management Review, Vol. 15, 315–328, (2018)

DOI: 10.1111/emre.12120

©2017 The AuthorsEuropean ManagementReview published byJohn Wiley & Sons Ltd onbehalf of European Academyof Management (EURAM)

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