The chapter discusses the important role that repatriation plays in career development or an international assignee’s personal and professional career outcomes acquired, developed, and accumulated over time. Attention is devoted to understanding how different types of career resources and competencies, categorized as “knowing how”, “knowing whom”, and “knowing why”, are developed as a function of living and working in another country. The chapter continues by drawing on the traditional bounded and emerging proactive career perspectives to help us understand why returning home is often more complex and difficult than perceived. Next, the chapter examines repatriation “success” from both the organizational and the individual repatriate’s points of view, highlighting objective and subjective interpretations of career success. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the challenges facing the repatriation process at the individual-, team-, organizational-, and country-levels and suggests interventions that could be considered in an effort to improve the likelihood of repatriation success. Implications for future research are also discussed.

This chapter addresses the following questions: Why and how do we need to rethink GM to enable it to master its future? What roles do GM professionals enact to refine their work and to make working abroad more attractive? Overall, this chapter explores the pressures that GM professionals are facing, provides insights into the roles of GM departments and develops a refined GM model. Notwithstanding some of the limitations that diverse contexts, diverging managerial objectives, lacking GM capabilities, and implementation difficulties present, it can be argued that smart, agile, flawless, and efficient GM work (SAFE GM) is at the core of a successful GM department. Smart organisational development and talent management; agile approaches to embrace a multitude of GM challenges successfully; flawless design of programme management and compliance approaches; and efficient ways to structure GM rewards, are leading to a professionalisation of global mobility work. Enacting this SAFE GM framework is likely to strengthen the position of GM departments in their organisation, making their work more strategic, operationally focussed and important.

This chapter introduces background information and recent trends in expatriation. It begins by briefly reviewing the early literature on expatriation, from the 1960s to the late-1980s. It then describes changes that occurred in the 1990s that transformed radically the area of global mobility. Finally, the chapter outlines key trends in global mobility that define the landscape of the topic today. The chapter concludes by summarising the contents and key contributions that the reader will find in each chapter of this book.

Adjustment is the process of changing behaviour, feelings, and cognitions to achieve a balance with the environment. Adjustment is needed whenever an individual transfers from a familiar setting to an unfamiliar setting to interact effectively and to feel a sense of belonging. Expatriates experience adjustment in the cognitive, affective, and behavioural dimensions and across different domains such as for example work, culture, and personal domains. The needed change includes new routines and uncertainty which might cause anxiety. Adjustment to the new situational context is essential for expatriation success. In this chapter, we examine what we have learnt from the literature. We discuss antecedents to adjustment and critically reflect on the most common approaches to analysing expatriate adjustment. Furthermore, new alternatives on how to understand adjustment that mitigate the limitations of previous models will be highlighted and we will provide insights on how to apply a holistic assessment. Finally, we will provide our readers with some practical and research implications.

Self-initiated expatriates (SIEs) are an important group of the globally mobile workforce. In contrast to assigned expatriates (AEs), SIEs relocate on their own volition and without company support. In recent years, the literature on SIEs has started to burgeon leading to an enhanced knowledge of SIEs. The purpose of this chapter is to first review and summarize central findings in the nascent body of research concerned with SIEs. In this regard, we focus on the following key areas of inquiry: definitions of SIEs, their (demographic) profiles, main motivations to relocate, cross-cultural adjustment, as well as career experiences, and outcomes of self-initiated expatriation. In second step, based on our overview of the extant literatures, we outline directions for future research on SIEs in each key area. The suggested future research avenues will be helpful to guide the next generation of studies on SIEs and to move this stream of research ahead.