The determinants of self intiated academic expatriates' performance in Malaysia

Globalization and internalization have led to many organizations, including the education sector to transform their establishment to change their path and increase the number of individuals interested in deciding to take up international assignments. Most of the organizations’ activities have turn into a more complex form as they need to deal with international human resource that involves people with different nationality and mixture of employees’ background. Therefore, the education sector are seeking for academic expatriates as they are known as mobile knowledge worker capable of transferring various knowledge hence, driving the universities to improve their global rankings on quality standards. The present study examines the relationship between the determinant factors (self efficacy, cross cultural training, family support and cultural similarity) and cross cultural adjustment as the mediating variable on the job performance using a sample of 114 academic expatriates in the public and private universities in northern region of Malaysia. The multiple regression analyses were used to answer the hypotheses of this study. The results of this study have revealed that there is a significant relationship between self efficacy, cross cultural training, family support and job performance (teaching and research performance) of academic expatriates in Malaysia while there is no relationship between cultural similarity and job performance (teaching and research performance) of academic expatriates in northern region of Malaysia. Following that, results have also revealed that cross cultural adjustment mediates the relationship between self efficacy, cross cultural training, family support and job performance (teaching and research performance) of academic expatriates in northern region of Malaysia but there is no mediation effect of CCA between cultural similarity and job performance (teaching and research performance) of academic expatriates in northern region of Malaysi