An Emerging Conceptual Framework to Assess Expatriates’ Return on Investment

Abstract

This paper develops a conceptual framework on expatriates’ Return on Investment (eROI) that disentangles the drivers of value creation from expatriation projects and identifies the psychological contract as crucial to overcome the traditional tension between organizational and individual objectives. Mainly designed for traditional medium- and long-term expatriation projects, our framework can also be extended to nascent types of assignments in times of COVID-19 pandemic, e.g. virtual assignments.

Keywords

• expatriate roi
• psychological contract
• personal resources
• competencies
• transversal dimensions
• expatriate invested capital
• performance management
• retention
• international assignment
• covid-19
• global markets