Seconded National Experts and global mobility—Extending the paradigm

Abstract

Global mobility is an expanding field of academic research, which identifies an increasing range of modern variants of people working abroad. The community of Seconded National Experts (SNEs) in the institutions, bodies, and agencies of the European Union (EU) is a distinct category of internationally mobile employees, which has so far been neglected. This article assesses the features of this influential group of people and compares them to other communities within the generally recognized expatriate community. The unique nature of SNEs and hence the challenges that need to be considered by human resource (HR) practitioners to ensure they achieve their desired goals at organizational and individual levels are identified. The findings suggest that expatriate typologies should be extended to include this unique community and provide further guidance to HR practitioners. Finally, areas for additional research are offered, with the aim of learning from SNEs to extend international assignment theory.

The Global Mobility function

“…GM specialists nor the business they served were interested in or focussed on measuring ROI. A plausible explanation is that ROI is often difficult to assess and it seems that in many organisations a "gut feeling" and/or a vague but strong persuasion that sending an assignee into a specific location is beneficial, seems to be regarded as sufficient (AIR-INC, 2019;Doherty and Dickmann, 2012;Renshaw et al, 2018). This reinforces the contention that ROI has remained elusive and there is an absence of robust measurement methods (Carbery, 2015).…”

International assignments – extending an organizational value framework

“…If an individual is sent on an IA as a leadership development experience then a sister organization, whether in the same country as the host or elsewhere, could seek to recruit the individual and hence benefit from the value the assignee might create. The funding of an IA does not automatically sit with the organization in which the assignee works whilst on assignment (Renshaw, Parry and Dickmann, 2018a) which further complicates this dynamic. Similarly, competition for the value generated by IAs is present when other organizations seek to employ/poach staff.…”