Recently, a collaborative article titled Expatriates’ boundary-spanning: double-edged effects in multinational enterprises by Assistant Professor Ya Xi Shen from the Business School of Hunan University was published in Journal of International Business Studies (JIBS). The paper was co-authored by Associate Professor Ting Liu, Professor Tomoki Sekiguchi, and Dr. Jiayin Qin, from Kyoto University, Japan. JIBS is a premier journal in the field of management and is recognized as one of the most influential and respected academic publications in international business. It holds a high academic reputation and is included in both the UTD Top 24 Journal list and the Financial Times Top 50 Journal list. This research was funded by NSFC Grant Number 72272049.
Expatriates typically perform boundary-spanning to address challenges related to functional, linguistic, and cultural variations within multinational enterprises (MNEs), which in turn influences their relationships with host-country employees. Integrating social capital and role theory perspectives, this study explores the relational dynamics between expatriates and host-country employees by developing a novel theoretical framework that examines the double-edged effects of expatriates’ boundary-spanning. We propose that expatriates’ boundary-spanning nurtures mutual trust between expatriates and host-country employees, further facilitating expatriates’ identification with subsidiaries and host-country employees’ identification with MNEs. On the other hand, we propose that boundary-spanning increases expatriates’ role stressors, causing expatriates’ emotional exhaustion and outgroup categorization by host-country employees. We further categorize expatriates’ boundary-spanning into three types (functional, linguistic, and cultural) and theorize about their varying effects on the cognitive and affective bases of mutual trust and on role stressors. With data from 177 expatriate–host-country coworker dyads in Chinese MNEs, our double-edged framework is generally supported.
Ya Xi Shen (PhD, Australian National University) is Assistant Professor at the Business School, Hunan University, China. Her research centers on organizational behavior and international management, with a particular focus on language, culture, identity, and the ethical dimensions of global talent working within multinational corporations. Other research interests include the application of local cultural concepts in the age of artificial intelligence, the development of female leadership, and retirement and re-employment of elder employees. Her research has been published in several internationally renowned journals, includingJournal of International Business Studies,Journal of Business EthicsandInternational Journal of Human Resource Management.
