Inpatriation and post-shock career adaptation

Abstract

This dissertation explores the processes by which inpatriates – a specific type of global employee who has been transferred from a local subsidiary office to the foreign headquarters of their multinational employer – attribute meaning to a substantial disruption of their global work roles. I explore the intersection of inpatriation and adaptation in a volatile work environment, with a vocational interest in how a global crisis functions as meaningful for individuals’ careers. This research is based on interviews with 25 inpatriates who were working in a foreign country during the onset, and usually the duration, of the COVID-19 global pandemic. I investigate the extent to which their international assignments, or global work roles, were affected by the global crisis; I explore the contingencies constraining and influencing inpatriates’ career decisions during this highly uncertain time; and I elucidate a psychosocial framework of inpatriates’ career adaptation under such conditions. By conceptualizing a global pandemic as an exogenous shock to one’s globally oriented career, I found that many inpatriates exhibited a counterintuitive response, expressing positive valence toward the career effects of the disruptive event, with salutary consequences including that the shock fostered global identity emergence. The negative case analysis indicated that limited personal agency, or perhaps insufficient adaptive readiness, might explain some of the discrepancy in the global employees’ self-reported career consequences. Drawing upon the sensemaking and career construction literatures, I discuss the implications of these research findings for international human resource management and, specifically, inpatriation as an organizational and vocational globalization strategy.