Repatriate Adjustment Among the Academics in Sri Lanka

Abstract

problem among the academics, where the academics find difficulties in adjusting back to the local context after the international academic assignments. Although this is a pertinent issue, in the extant body of literature investigations are lacking. This paper aims to investigate the factors affecting the repatriation adjustment among the academics in the Sri Lankan context. In addition, this paper investigates whether the proactive personality of academics moderate the impact of the factors affecting repatriation adjustment. For this purpose, 120 academic repatriates have been considered from the Sri Lankan universities. Structural equation modelling has been used to test the hypotheses through AMOS statistical package. Findings of the study suggests adjustment of the academic repatriates to the local context is affected by the individual factors, organizational factors and other factors. Further, personality moderates the impact of these factors on repatriation adjustment. This suggests that, presence of proactive personality facilitate academics to perceive the individual factors, organizational factors and other factors in a favorable manner which would smooth their adjustment process in the local context. The findings provide significant insights for the university administrators to facilitate smooth adjustment of academics to the local context after their foreign assignments. The originality of this paper is on its contribution to the literature by examining the repatriation model of Black et al. that has not been thoroughly analyzed before as a whole. Further, the extension introduced for the model through incorporating personality as a moderator provides a significant contribution to better explain repatriate adjustment phenomenon among the repatriate academics.