Inpatriate career profiles: a historical review and future outlook

The infectious need to globalize has ostensibly led firms to increasingly appoint inpatriates, although their defined value and impact across contexts such as country location and hierarchical levels remain largely unexplored (Maley and Kramar 2010; Moeller and Reiche 2017; Reiche et al. 2009). Recent research suggests that inpatriates are progressively used to a similar extent as expatriates (Collings et al. 2010; Harzing et al. 2016) as a way to achieve a global core competency at headquarter (HQ) locations (Harvey and Novicevic 2000b; Harvey and Buckley 1997; Tungli and Peiperl 2009). Mirroring the growth in corporate interest in inpatriate staffing is survey data which observes a relatively high percentage (57%) of employees being relocated either to or from the HQ country (BGRS 2015), although this non-discerning relocation percentage includes estimated inpatriate (to HQ) and expatriate (from HQ) statistics. Parallel to the discussion of inpatriate value and impact at HQ and beyond, the pattern of inpatriate career lifecycles which could possibly impact their value proposition remains inconclusive at best