The Interactive Effect of Personality and Cultural Novelty on Academic Expatriates' International Adjustment

摘要

Although there are many studies on expatriate adjustment with the developing global economy, little attention is paid to academic expatriates or visiting scholars. Questionnaire data from 1310 Chinese academic expatriates in nearly 20 countries were analyzed with the help of China Scholarship Council who dispatched and funded them to do cooperative research with overseas professors, and we examined the roles of personality and cultural novelty in their international adjustment excluding the effects of other control variables, such as demographic characteristics, etc. Our results showed that five factors of personality traits have different effects on the three dimensions of academic expatriate adjustment. Extroversion has positive effects on general adjustment and interaction adjustment. And agreeableness was found to be a predictor of general adjustment, not of the other two. Conscientiousness and Neuroticism have no effect on any of the three dimensions of adjustment. And openness to experience has positive effects on interaction adjustment and work adjustment. We also can see female adjusts well than male on interaction adjustment and work adjustment. The implications for both researchers and practitioners are discussed in the end.