What determines expatriates’ performance while abroad? The role of job embeddedness

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine job embeddedness as antecedent of job performance and organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) of expatriates. Design/methodology/approach – In total, 194 expatriates from 39 nationalities were recruited through various expatriate organizations, which provided expatriate groups they had access to with a link to the online survey in English. To test the hypotheses, the author used bivariate analyses and multivariate regressions were calculated to control for alternative explanations. Findings – As hypothesized, community embeddedness was positively related to job performance and both organizational embeddedness and community embeddedness were positively related to OCBs. Moreover, community embeddedness and organizational embeddedness showed to be positively related. In addition, organizational embeddedness partially mediated the positive relationship between community embeddedness and job performance for organizational expatriates (moderated mediation) as well as the positive relationship between community embeddedness and OCBs. Originality/value – This is one of the first study to address the differential effects of organizational and community embeddedness on job performance in an expatriation context.