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How Inpatriates Internalize Corporate Values at Headquarters: The Role of Developmental Job Assignments and Psychosocial Mentoring

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Abstract

Multinational companies (MNCs) often invite foreign subsidiary employees or inpatriates to their headquarters (HQ) to internalize the MNCs’ corporate values and transfer those values to their subsidiaries after repatriation. However, there is a lack of understanding about how and why inpatriates internalize these corporate values during their HQ experiences. By integrating the perspectives of international adjustment and organizational socialization with that of on-the-job learning, we develop a model wherein the job-related and psychosocial factors that inpatriates encounter at HQ promote their internalization of corporate values. Using a sample of 110 foreign subsidiary employee–supervisor dyads from the HQ of a Japanese MNC to which the employees were assigned as inpatriates, we found that developmental job assignments and psychosocial mentoring during inpatriation influenced the internalization of corporate values, which was partially and sequentially mediated by proactive socialization behavior and organizational identification. This study’s findings have significant implications for the theory and practice of inpatriation management, particularly with regard to how MNCs promote the internalization of corporate values among inpatriates.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Co-Editor-in-Chief Joachim Wolf and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive and developmental feedback. We also thank Ralf Bebenroth, Priska Setiawan, Mohan Maharjan, and Prasad Hettiararchchi for their help in data collection, analysis, and manuscript preparation. We are grateful to the people at Company X (Psudoname) for their cooperation in this research. This work was supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (Grant Numbers: 26285085 and 17H02559) from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.

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Sekiguchi, T., Takeuchi, N., Takeuchi, T. et al. How Inpatriates Internalize Corporate Values at Headquarters: The Role of Developmental Job Assignments and Psychosocial Mentoring. Manag Int Rev 59, 825–853 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11575-019-00401-x

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