The JGM BitBlog: Where's the Leadership? Uncovering a Six-Decade Gap in Global Mobility Research
Mark E. Mendenhall, Gary W. Rollins College of Business, The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Chattanooga, Tennessee, USA
B. Sebastian Reiche, IESE Business School, Department of Managing People in Organizations, IESE Business School, Barcelona, Spain
Many expatriates have leadership responsibilities during their assignments abroad, so one would assume that management researchers have studied their leadership roles and the various challenges they face in those roles. From the 1980s to the present, when globalization reshaped the landscape of business, one would expect a robust body of research to have formed that studied this dynamic. Surprisingly, this is not the case.
Despite the leadership roles many expatriates often hold in their international assignments, we found only 40 scholarly articles have been published on this critical topic over the past six decades! This glaring oversight raises a provocative question: Why has the academic community largely ignored the leadership challenges faced by expatriates? In our recent article in the Journal of Global Mobility, we shine a spotlight on this neglected area of study.
We provide answers to why this area of research has been neglected in the field, but more importantly, we propose that this oversight in the expatriate research literature now offers scholars a wonderful opportunity to explore an entirely new stream of research in global mobility in the following ways:
First, we argue that expatriation serves as a rich context in which traditional leadership theories can be studied, resulting in a deeper understanding of boundary conditions associated with these extant theories. Doing so would breathe new life into the study of traditional leadership theories, enabling their further refinement and a better understanding of the limitations of their generalizability. As we stated in our article, "the good news for global mobility scholars is that the field of leadership offers numerous extant models and theories that can be used to investigate the unique nature of leadership in the expatriate context." A whole new stream of research exists for global mobility scholars.
Second, we chart the evolution of the global leadership field, and we advocate for a deeper exploration of how existing theories from that field can enhance our understanding of expatriates as leaders. By integrating and deploying these theories in empirical studies that use samples with clearly differentiated types of expatriates, leadership-specific theories of global leadership will be further refined, and the role of leadership in global mobility will be better understood.
Third, in our article, we discuss one model that focuses on the varying types of leadership roles that global leaders (and expatriates) experience in their international assignments. We argue that this model has the potential to help global mobility scholars enhance their sampling criteria in a fine-grained way to study expatriates as leaders, test varying configurations of context and the impact of those configurations on expatriate leadership, and, amongst others, how varying characteristics of the nature of an international assignment requires varying types of leadership strategies.
The time has come to include leadership in the variable set of the study of expatriates. As a field of scholars, we have ignored this critical aspect of global mobility for far too long.
To read the full article, please see:
Mendenhall, M.E. and Reiche, B.S. (2025), "EXPERT REVIEW SERIES Restoring a parched tributary in global mobility research: the study of expatriates as leaders", Journal of Global Mobility, Vol. 13 No. 1, pp. 154-173. https://doi.org/10.1108/JGM-06-2024-0062" target="_blank" rel="noopener">https://doi.org/10.1108/JGM-06-2024-0062
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Professor Jan Selmer, Ph.D.
Founding Editor-in-Chief
Journal of Global Mobility (JGM)
Department of Management, Aarhus University
E-mail:
selmer@mgmt.au.dkTwitter: @JanSelmer_JGM
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