Betina Szkudlarek

The University of Sydney · Discipline of International Business

Despite numerous publications on expatriation, the theme of cross-cultural reentry (its course, impact and features) still remains largely neglected and underestimated in the sojourner's transition trajectory. At the same time, available empirical investigations point to a number of substantial concerns, which affect the psychological wellbeing, so...

Intercultural corporate training is a growing branch of the coaching and consulting industries and it appears to be both theory and practice driven. The growth of the relevant academic literature reveals a focus on the successful adaptation to host cultures and organizations, but little attention to the ethical dimensions of newly learned rules and...

The overwhelming number of refugees in the world today constitutes a major socio-economic and political challenge. With more than 50 years of scholarship on global mobility, International Business (IB) should be well positioned to address this challenge. Yet the field’s historic emphasis on expatriates has resulted in dominant assumptions and persp...

Increasing levels of displacement and the need to integrate refugees in the workforce pose new challenges to organizations and societies. Extant research on refugee employment and workforce integration currently resides across various disconnected disciplines, posing a significant challenge for management scholars to contribute to timely and releva...

Purpose This study aims to respond to repeated calls for more process-focused research on effectual entrepreneurship. It illustrates how effectuation takes place, particularly through gaining the commitment of actors with diverse resources, knowledge and needs in a context characterized by power disparities. It illuminates the ethical concerns face...

In the global war for talent, refugees are often overlooked. Yet, research indicates that employers who expanded their recruitment strategies to include refugee jobseekers were not only satisfied with their new hires, but also excited about the potential impact refugee recruitment could have on their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) strategie...

As the number of refugees worldwide continues to increase, Human Resource Management (HRM) scholars and practitioners have an opportunity to rethink their role in advancing workforce integration for this highly vulnerable group of jobseekers. In this introduction to a special issue on refugee workforce integration, we argue that in order to promote...

Recent research suggests that human resource management (HRM) can play a crucial role in corporate social responsibility (CSR) and in addressing grand challenges, such as refugee workforce integration. This paper investigates how employers carry out their CSR goals through HRM practices, while working closely with non‐profit organisations (NPOs) th...

Recent research suggests that human resource management (HRM) can play a crucial role in corporate social responsibility (CSR) and in addressing grand challenges, such as refugee workforce integration. This paper investigates how employers carry out their CSR goals through HRM practices, while working closely with non-profit organizations (NPOs) th...

Australian employers who want to hire refugees often do not know where to start. This guide is based on opportunities and challenges identified by employers and the types of support they found most useful to hire and integrate refugees into their organisations successfully. Previous research found that successful hiring processes are often based on...

This year was unusual in many respects. Little did we expect that our call for interdisciplinary research on Global Leadership would be of such relevance in the world's continuing attempt to battle the COVID-19 pandemic. As stated in our call for papers, we were: …especially interested in what other disciplines can contribute to better understand,...

As the world struggled to come to grips with the Covid-19 pandemic, over twenty scholars, practitioners, and global leaders wrote brief essays for this curated chapter on the role of global leadership in this extreme example of a global crisis. Their thoughts span helpful theoretical breakthroughs to essential, pragmatic adaptations by companies.

Knowledge transfer is an important global leader (GL) competency, given their role as knowledge brokers and capacity builders. However, knowledge transfer skills and the transfer process itself have received scant attention from both global mobility and leadership scholars. Similarly, multinationals have seldom systematically collected and utilized...

How does professional employment support provided by newcomer support organizations (NSOs) influence highly-skilled refugees’ professional identities and workforce integration? To answer this question, we draw on interviews with 25 managers and staff of NSOs in Canada and 11 recently arrived, highly-skilled refugees. We contribute to the literature...

Researchers have been studying the effectiveness of people working across borders for decades, through many different disciplinary lenses. In management research, Intercultural Competence (ICC) developed mainly by theorizing about and studying a narrow set of cross-boundary interactions: professionals working outside their home country. Increasingl...

This article addresses the temporality of resistance in the work context. We focus on the challenge of increasingly diminishing professional autonomy in higher education institutions as well as the vulnerability of staff subjected to academic managerialism. A case where a lecturer is exposed to the requirements to revise grading by senior administr...

In today’s globalized world with significant cross-border migration, societies and organizations are becoming increasingly diverse with a rise in the number of multicultural individuals (Fitzsimmons, 2013). Research on multiculturalism is often impeded by the lack of clarity and consistency in the conceptualization and operationalization of multicu...

This article addresses the temporality of resistance in the work context. We focus on the challenge of increasingly diminishing professional autonomy in higher education institutions as well as the vulnerability of staff subjected to academic managerialism. A case where a lecturer is exposed to the requirements to revise grading by senior administr...

The centrality of communication in international business (IB) is undeniable; yet our understanding of the phenomenon is partially constrained by a cross-cultural comparative focus as opposed to intercultural, process-oriented research designs that capture the dynamic nature of communicative interactions. Our brief review of studies at the intersec...

Despite the human potential and ambitious aspirations of humanitarian migrants they face high levels of un- and under-employment. The aim of this report is to understand employers’ perceptions and experiences of hiring refugees, and how public policy could encourage or support employers to employ refugees successfully in greater numbers on a sustai...

We review academic journal articles, chapters in scholarly books, and dissertations that were published in the global leadership domain in 2018 and compare our findings with those of Mendenhall, Li, and Osland’s (2016) earlier review of the 2010-2014 period. Specifically, we trace and discuss relevant changes over time in the number of authors, nat...

The fair and equal treatment of individuals across demographic groups represents both challenges and opportunities within domestic settings. Within international settings, where there is additional complexity and variety, the challenges and opportunities are heightened. This panel symposium will identify what makes diversity and inclusion (D&I) uni...

The world continues to experience an ever expanding flow of migration that contributes to the changing nature of global population and increased diversification of workforce. According to United Nations (2017), from 2000 to 2015, migration contributed to 42% of the population growth in North America, and 31% in the Oceania region. Today, there are...

In this paper we review multidisciplinary literature on refugees with the aim of stimulating informed interdisciplinary research that addresses the increasingly topical issue of refugee workforce integration. We organise our findings around three levels of analysis – macro-national, meso-organisational and micro- individual – to outline the complex...

This study employs phenomenography to investigate the role of embeddedness in business venturing of migrant and ethnic entrepreneurs. By focusing on two culturally distinct groups, operating in the same micro-economic context, we show the ways in which embeddedness impacts the perceptions and subsequent enactment of business venturing. Our findings...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to address the decreasing role of professional associations in governing the work of entrepreneurial, knowledge-intensive professions such as management consulting. It presents the example of an alternative path to traditional professional regulation. This organic professionalization path is introduced through...

In response to recent calls for a better understanding of the connection between social enterprises and their environments, we focus on the influence of funding relationships on social impact measurement in social enterprises in Vietnam. We utilize resource dependence theory and take a multiple case study approach to explore the issue. The findings...

Purpose – The purpose of this exploratory, empirical study is to gain insight into repatriation experiences and repatriate turnover intention of employees from India and The Netherlands who either were or had been on international assignments in the respective countries. Design/methodology/approach – Interviews were conducted with 25 Dutch and 3...

This paper reports the results of theory-building qualitative research that aims to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the role of trust as it affects repatriate knowledge transfer. Data were obtained from 29 semi-structured interviews with German and U.S. repatriates using the critical incident technique. First, repatriates perceived an...

To date, no reliable and valid instrument exists that measures repatriate knowledge transfer. Therefore, this paper demonstrates the initial steps of the item and scale development process of a new instrument measuring repatriate knowledge transfer. The original item pool was reduced and four scales were developed based on the following selection c...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to add a process perspective to the literature on repatriate knowledge transfer (RKT) and to understand how the knowledge transfer process unfolds in the repatriation context. Thus, this qualitative study uses existing knowledge transfer process models to assess their applicability to the context of repatriati...

Admitting large numbers of international students appears to be a competitive strategy for business schools to survive in recent times. Yet, in the face of globalization pressures and the increasing number of international students, it remains unclear how cross-cultural diversity should be best addressed in management education. Business schools ar...

While reentry transition has long been regarded as one of the most challenging phases of an expatriate assignment cycle, reentry training has received little scholarly attention. Using a qualitative research design based on interviews with 31 training providers, we bring the issue of reentry training into focus. Our findings shed light on three com...

Ethicalisation processes that partake in the construction of a firm or a professional group’s ethical identity are often described as a relatively linear combination of several components, such as policies (starting with the development of a code of ethics), corporate practices, and leadership. Our study of a professional community dealing with the...

In a series of interviews with leading cross-cultural management (CCM) educators, we examine the state of the CCM field within business education. We invited eight prominent scholars and executive educators to consider the following main questions: What is the role of cross-cultural management in business curricula? What challenges do we face teach...

Purpose ‐ The purpose of this paper is to explore the influence of cultural identity change, organizational and social support and cultural distance on repatriation experiences of Indian international assignees. Design/methodology/approach ‐ Semi-structured interviews were held with 19 Indians on international assignment in The Netherlands and 11 I...

Over the past decade, we have become particularly enamored with an approach to multinational organizational research—the proximal approach, which is characterized by openness to the unexpected, acceptance of uncertainty, and appreciation of multiplicity. This approach can be contrasted with more distal approaches, which emphasize end states, linear...

The cross-border mobility of staff is an everyday reality readily taken for granted by internationally minded employers and employees. Cross-border resettlement in business, education, leisure and political spheres has increased over the last few decades as the fingers of international commerce have encircled the globe.

Eighteen years of research on cultural values in more than 40 countries led Charles Hampden-Turner and Fons Trompenaars, the authors of Building Cross-cultural Competence: How to Create Wealth from Conflicting Values to, as they claim, significant discoveries. Like in several other publications (1993, 1998) Hampden-Turner and Trompenaars once again...

Reentry transition has often been documented as potentially being the most challenging phase of the international transition cycle. Moreover, while the expatriating individuals are thoroughly prepared for their international sojourn, the returning individuals and their organizations rarely expect any adjustment difficulties upon reentry. This trend...