Assessing the Determinants of the Cross-Cultural Adjustment of Academic Expatriate

Increasing the global competition and chasing the internationalization of world markets contributes to the rapid changing in international management as well as international human resource management. As international organization is moving towards internationalization, hiring expatriates become important part of the company’s strategy to internationalize their organization. Therefore, academic institutions are also applying the same strategy by hiring the academic expatriates to share their knowledge regarding their worldwide experience to the local universities. To assist them in adjusting in the cross-cultural environment in the host country, it is important to know the determinants of the cross-cultural adjustment. For this reason, this study was conducted to know the determinants of the cross-cultural adjustment of academic expatriate in Malaysia with the proposed framework to investigate the relationship among job satisfaction, family support and self-efficacy to the cross-cultural adjustment. Furthermore, there is lack of studies that had been done on academic expatriate in Malaysia about their cross-cultural adjustment. In investigating the experiences of academic expatriates in Malaysia, the instrument used was a set of questionnaire. Data was gathered among 114 academic expatriates from Universiti Utara Malaysia, Universiti Malaysia Terengganu and Universiti Malaysia Perlis. This study used the Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) as the system to analyze the data. The descriptive analysis, reliability analysis and correlation analysis were undertaken in this study. Three hypotheses were tested in this study and results show that all hypotheses are accepted, which means that all independent variables have significant relationship with the cross-cultural adjustment factor. The proposed framework of this study can be used by the academic expatriates themselves and the management of universities as a guideline in designing and improving the cross-cultural adjustment as well as international human resource interventions.