| Multinational organizations increasingly rely on expatriates to fill key organizational positions, but little is known about the factors that affect expatriate adjustment. Further, research on expatriates rarely distinguishes between expatriates who are assigned international positions by their organizations (i.e., organizationally-assigned) and those who voluntarily travel overseas in search of employment (i.e., self-initiated). The few studies that have done so have failed to account for the possibility that expatriates may differ in the degree to which they initiate their expatriation or are organizationally-assigned. The purpose of this study was to determine whether cultural intelligence and the degree to which expatriates initiated their expatriation predict their host country adjustment. American expatriates (N = 207) completed online measures assessing metacognitive, cognitive, motivational, and behavioral cultural intelligence; general, interaction, and work adjustment; and the extent to which they viewed their international experience as self-initiated. Data were collected via Amazon's crowdsourcing marketplace Mechanical Turk and hypotheses were testing using structural equation modeling procedures. Results indicated that self-initiation was positively correlated with higher metacognitive, cognitive, motivational, and behavioral cultural intelligence, but had no positive direct effects on general, interaction, or work adjustment. Further, metacognitive (but not cognitive, motivational, or behavioral) cultural intelligence displayed positive direct associations with general, interaction, and work adjustment when controlling for gender, familiarity with the host-country, and pre-departure research conducted on the host country. To the extent that these findings reflect relationships, they have implications for organizations that utilize expatriates. For example, hiring managers may wish to consider expatriate candidate metacognitive cultural intelligence as a basis for selecting expatriates, and pre-departure cross-cultural training may better promote expatriate adjustment to the extent that it helps trainees develop metacognitive cultural intelligence. |
