Expatriates’ Work Engagement in Focus. A Qualitative Exploration

Research constantly show how work engagement is critical to company success, performance, and survival. Thus, putting the worker in the front as a subject for understanding how work engagement is experienced and fostered can be vital to organization. A context that has remained below the radar of researchers studying work engagement is expatriation. Equally, the expatriation literature has not paid sufficient attention to the phenomenon of work engagement. Through e-interviews with 27 Nordic assigned expatriates in 16 host countries, we explore the factors contributing to assigned expatriates’ work engagement. We identify two clusters of antecedents — general and specific — and decompose each cluster into contextual and job-related factors. We establish how these antecedents lead to absorption, dedication, and vigor as three components of work engagement and depict the links in a conceptual framework. Our qualitative study contributes to the expatriate literature by exploring the creation of assigned expatriates’ work engagement and the engagement literature by exploring engagement in a new occupational work setting, namely international assignments. Implications for research and practice are outlined.