Determinants of Expatriate Willingness of Employees at Chinese MNCs in the Mobile Phone Manufacturing

Abstract

In the past few years, several of enterprises which are increasing have been actively expanding their volume of their overseas business with the continuous speeding-up of the internationalization process in domestic enterprises. At the same time, several Chinese mobile phone companies invested and constructed their factories in other countries with large number and the past few years have witnessed their good development moment. In the process of expansion of overseas business, some of enterprises choose the expatriate staff to promote the development of its overseas projects. Responding to the expatriates’ significance, some of researches has paid attention to various issues of expatriation significantly. For enterprises, it is very important to analyze the reasons of the dispatching failure and try to learn how to minimize the possibility of such failure. Based on the situation above, it is important to select the expatriates who are suitable for finishing the overseas assignments. Most of previous studies are focus on the variables of organizational factors such as selecting rules, expatriation education, salary, working condition in foreign countries and so on, but this study will research the topic of expatriation willingness at individual level. Based on Self-Efficacy Theory and Job Demands-Resources Theory at the status of sociocultural perspective, we hypothesized that the independent variables of overseas experience and foreign contact in daily life, mediation variable of cultural intelligence (CQ) will influence the expatriation willingness positively. We also hypothesized CQ as mediating effect in the direct relationship between overseas experience/foreign contact and expatriation willingness. And we research these hypothesis together with factors of gender and marital status as control variables. According to the result of empirical analysis, overseas experiences, foreign contacts and CQ are positively related to expatriation willingness, CQ has complete mediating effect between overseas experiences and has partial mediating effect between foreign contacts and expatriation willingness. We summarized the research conclusion at the end of paper and explained the reason of why CQ has the mediating effect. Based on the conclusion about that, in order to improve the success rate of expatriation, we have putted forward some suggestions about how to enhance the employees’CQ and other proposals. And we have also pointed out some limitation about this study at last, so that may provid some reference for future research.