Cross-cultural adjustment for Nordic expatriates in the United States: The relationship between sociocultural adjustment, cultural intelligence, job satisfaction, and prior experience

The U.S. has become a popular destination for organizations to extend their business and organizations are sending their employees to a new host location depending on transfer of knowledge and skills. When moving to the host country, employees are faced with the challenge of adapting to new societal culture, work expectations, lifestyle and norms. This study applied a quantitative research design to determine the nature of the relationship between sociocultural adjustment (general adjustment, interactional adjustment and work adjustment) and cultural intelligence (meta-cognitive, cognitive, behavior and motivation), job satisfaction (intrinsic and extrinsic) and prior experience for Nordic (Danish, Finnish, Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish) expatriates in the U.S. The results indicated that cultural intelligence is not contributing positively to sociocultural adjustment and that behavior cultural intelligence is negatively related to work adjustment. On the other hand job satisfaction was found to have a significant positive relationship with all of the sociocultural variables. When comparing extrinsic satisfaction between genders a noticeable significant difference was found. Males reported to be more satisfied with extrinsic rewards than women. Prior living and working experience in the U.S. of more than two years was positively related to general adjustment. The research analysis includes practical implications in relation to expatriate selection and training as well as theoretical implications for further study.