The dominant perspective on expatriation characterizes the process as a continuing adaptation to existing job demands on an international assignment. Another, less studied perspective, emphasizes that expatriates can initiate tactics to acquire task, interpersonal, and affective resources for shaping their assignment experiences. Adopting a positive organizational scholarship lens and drawing on the job demands–resources model, we simultaneously examine both of these reactive demand‐based and proactive resource‐based pathways to expatriate retention. We propose that cross‐cultural uncertainty demands and expatriate‐initiated resource acquisition tactics both influence adjustment and embeddedness. Thus embeddedness works alongside adjustment to drive expatriates’ plans to remain in the international position, which in turn leads to actual retention. Using evidence from 2 separate panel studies (one with 2 waves and the other with 4 waves of data), we demonstrate the importance of the resource‐based pathway for expatriate assignments.

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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to propose a model that examines the influences of expatriate community relationship building behaviors on community embeddedness and community embeddedness on expatriate retention cognitions. The authors further investigate the moderating role of organizational identification. Design/methodology/approach Survey data from 127 expatriates in the USA were collected and analyzed. The authors used multiple (moderator) hierarchical regression analyses to test the hypotheses. In addition, simple slopes analyses were conducted to further understand the interaction effects. Findings The results demonstrate that community relationship building behaviors positively influence expatriate community embeddedness, and the latter is associated with stronger retention cognitions. In addition, the paper finds that, for individuals who have lower levels of organizational identification, community embeddedness is particularly important. Research limitations/implications This study is based on cross-sectional and self-report data, which limits the ability to draw definitive conclusions about causality. Thus, more multi-source and longitudinal data from different expatriate populations would increase the validity and the generalizability of findings. The theory and empirical evidence indicate the importance of community embeddedness, particularly when organizational identification is low, for expatriates’ retention cognitions. Practical implications This study examines the important role of community relationship building behaviors on community embeddedness, and the role of community embeddedness in expatriates’ intention to stay. Originality/value This paper integrates the unique view of personal resources associated with different social contexts (i.e. community and organizational contexts) in expatriate studies.

Past research has identified both employee characteristics and aspects of the work environment that can serve as antecedents to positive and negative workplace behavior. This article reviews research identifying the major factors that prompt both counterproductive work behaviors (CWB) and organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB). The dynamics of these relations are discussed, and possible approaches for workplace diagnosis and interventions designed to negate CWB and foster OCB are offered. A special focus on the implications of and possible interventions incorporating organizational justice are also presented.In the past several years, organizational behavior literature has benefited from a growing body of research that has moved beyond investigations of task performance and ventured into other performance domains of counterproductive work behavior (CWB) and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB; Conlon, Meyer, & Nowakowski, 2005;Dalal, 2005). This research has revealed both employee characteristics and aspects of the work environment that can serve as antecedents to such positive or negative behavior. For instance, studies have examined organizational factors such as job design (Tompson &

Drawing on Conservation of Resources theory and the socially embedded model of thriving, we examine the resource antecedents and retention outcome of expatriate thriving. Using two-wave panel data from 103 international teachers in the United States, we found that the personal resource of cultural intelligence directly influenced thriving, and thriving led to expatriate actual retention. In addition, the contextual resource of organizational embeddedness served as a boundary condition that augmented cultural intelligence’s positive effect on thriving. Applying the concept of thriving to explicate expatriate experiences, we go beyond the dominant emphasis in the expatriate literature on expatriate adjustment. In doing so, we highlight the joint contribution of both personal and contextual resources associated with global work experiences and pinpoint potential boundary conditions that enable thriving.