Understanding the Self-initiated

Expatriate Academics in Institutions of Higher Education in Malaysia:

An Exploratory Study

ChyeKok HO

Swinburne University Sarawak Campus

Patricia Yin Yin LAU

Monash University Sunway Campus

2nd Applied International Business Conference

Kota Kinabalu Sabah Malaysia | December 7-8, 2013

One University | Two Countries

Established in 2000

Located in Kuching,

capital city of

Sarawak, Malaysia

One campus

Established in 1908

Located in Melbourne,

capital city of Victoria,

Australia

Three campuses

The Research

Why academics take self-initiated decision to leave their home country for an indeterminable period of time to pursue scholarly work at an institution of higher education in Malaysia?

Why?

A deeper understanding of the mistakes and failures in international recruitment, selection, and repatriation of self-initiated expatriate academics

An influence on the strategy, policy and practice in International Human Resource Management in order to attract and retain highly-qualified self-initiated expatriate academics

An informed perspective on immigration policies relating to employment restrictions of international assignees and their spouses/partners

A Self-initiated Expatriate Academic

Towards a working definition … internationally mobile self-funded move to another country on its own

volition to pursue scholarly work at a higher education institution

for an indeterminable duration on a host-country contractual

arrangement

An Australian educated, worked & lived in Singapore, United Kingdom, Australia & currently residing and working in Malaysia.

Practice leader to multinational corporations,

employer’s federations, labour organisations in Beijing, Ulaanbaatar, Hanoi, Danang, HoChiMinh City, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore & an agency of the Singapore Government.

Was Vice-President of HR for Investment Bank J.P. Morgan; Global Head of HR for

government-linked conglomerate Singapore Technologies Industrial; and Regional HR Director for information storage media manufacturer Seagate Technology International.

Prior to Swinburne Sarawak, a self-initiated

expatriate academic at the Department of Management, Monash University Sunway campus

An example of a highly motivated

self-initiated expatriate academic

The Demand for Self-Initiated Expatriate Academics

The internationalisation of higher education (Mason, 1998; Welch, 1997) and strategic alliances of universities and other educational institutions (Schuster, 1994; Scott, 1994) offering tertiary education at overseas branch campuses led to an increase of academics to self-initiate the move away from home country (Altbach, 1996; Schermerhorn, 1999; Richardson and McKenna, 2003; Richardson 2003, 2009; Inkson and Myers, 2003; Doherty, Dickmann and Mills, 2011)

The Supply of Self-Initiated Expatriate Academics

An increasing number of people look beyond their home countries for lifestyle and employment opportunities

Highly-educated talented people with the means and motivation to migrate will increase (Goldin, I. Cameron, G. and Balarajan, M., 2011).

Attraction and retention of self-initiated expatriate academic across geographical boundaries are increasingly challenging, particularly in knowledge-based societies

The Higher Education

Business in Malaysia

• Private institutions of higher education have become academic enterprises (Albatch, 1996; Fanghanel, 2012).

• The leading players are funded by government-linked conglomerates; publicly-listed corporations; political parties; self-funded or independent private colleges; and Malaysian branches of International universities (Chai, 2007).

• In 2007, there are thirty-two private universities and university colleges, four branch campuses of international universities and four-hundred and eighty-five colleges offering a range of academic and vocational courses.

National Higher Education

Strategic Plan 2013-2025

Seven thrusts of the National Higher Education Strategic Plan is to achieve the vision of transforming higher education into an international hub of excellence in higher education.

Three of the Institutions of Higher Education (IHEs) aspire to be positioned among the top hundred and one in the top fifty of world renowned universities

Fifteen per cent of the faculty members of IHEs are to be staffed by expatriates drawn from research universities globally

Self-initiated expatriate academics must anticipate creative tension between academia at the institutional and national levels (Richardson, 2009)

Literature Review:

Marital status & gender

The marital status and gender of self-initiated expatriate are important in adjusting to host-country cultures as a family nucleus (Brown, 2008).

The spouses or partners may have to give up their jobs, careers and the geographically proximity of their families to ‘trail’ the expatriate.

Employment restrictions (Pellico and Stroh, 1997) in Malaysia, make it difficult, if not impossible for spouses to seek work, or continue their careers in the host-country

Literature Review:

Cross-cultural adjustment

Cross-cultural adjustment of expatriate spouses do affect the work performance of the assignment

Women may self-initiate their own movement to another country to redress the ‘glass ceiling’ syndrome at home (Tharenou, 2010)

Literature Review:

Decision to leave home

The focus on career development of self-initiated expatriate academics as the motivation to leave home may be incomplete.

Individuals do not usually embark on an overseas assignment solely as part of career development (Inkson et al, 1997)

Literature Review:

Decision to leave home

Cultural experiences are as important as work; geographical exploration are motivated by broad curiosity rather than specific goals; and the learning agenda is personally improvised.

A desire for adventure, career and family concerns, as well as financial incentives influenced their decision to expatriate (Selmer and Lauring, 2011)

The Malaysian Studies

Tahir and Ismail (2007) examine cross-cultural challenges and adjustments of expatriates in Malaysia using case methods

Nadarajah, Kamil, Yusof and Khan (2011) review the literature on intercultural training and its impact on academic expatriates’ adjustment and performance in Malaysia to frame a structural model.

The role of organisational justice in determining work outcomes of national and expatriate staff in Malaysia is examined by Hassan and Hashim (2011)

A conceptual link between self-initiated expatriate academics with job satisfaction and organisational commitment is suggested Binti Wan Ibrahim, Ibrahim, and Muenjohn (2012).

The Research Method

There are approximately one-thousand and seven hundred expatriate academics in the public higher education institutions, and five thousand expatriate academics in the private institutions of higher education in Malaysia

Data was collected from a purposive sample of ninety-six highly-educated respondents

Items of the questionnaire survey are constructed from organisational routines, and published studies

An exploratory factor analysis extract factors of self-initiated expatriate academics’ decision to relocate to Malaysia

The Respondents Martial status & Gender

Of the self-initiated expatriate academics that responded to the survey, 68 of the respondents are men and 28 are women.

76 of the respondents are married; and 13 are single.

The Respondents

Education and Experience

10 of the respondents are under 30 years of age; 31 between ages of 31 to 40; and 32 are between 41 to 50 years; and 23 are above 50 years of age.

36 are from India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka; 16 from the ASEAN region; 14 from Europe; 7 from Australia and New Zealand; and 20 academics are from the Middle Eastern countries and others.

The Respondents

Education and Experience

61 self-initiated expatriate academics are employed at a private institution of learning

26 expatriates work at the branch campuses of International universities; and

8 work in a public institution of higher learning.

The Respondents

Education and Experience

65 of the expatriate academics are educated at doctoral level, and 30 held master degrees.

In terms of skills, 26 of the respondents have less than 3 years of working experience; 17 between 3 to 5 years; 14 between 5 to 10 years; and 39 have work for more than 10 years.

The Respondents

Education and Experience

For experience acquired overseas excluding current employment, 41 of the respondents had less than 3 years of overseas experience; 18 of the self-initiated expatriate academics have between 3 to 5 years; and 37 more than 5 years.

20 are from business, finance, and accounting; 20 from engineering; 21 from medicine and health; and 15 from arts and social science.

The Respondents:

Decision to leave home

Contributions to professional development

Opportunity of working overseas

Competencies to work overseas Experiencing cultural diversity Additional prestige associated

with working overseas Host country offers more

research opportunities; and The present situation in home

country is not to personal satisfaction

An Exploratory Factor Analysis

Self-initiated expatriate academics’ decisions to relocate to Malaysia resulted in six factors being extracted with a total variance of 65.2%.

All the factor loadings are above 0.55 with a sample size of 96.

Two items are deleted because of cross-loadings

Five factors explaining reasons for self-initiated expatriates to move to Malaysia.

The five factors are host-country socio-economic; host-country infrastructure; individual benefits; competency of self-initiated expatriate academics; and work experience.

Concluding Remarks

The demography of the self-initiated expatriate academics in Malaysia are diverse, supporting the previous studies (Suutari and Brewster, 2000; Thorn, 2009; Selmur and Lauring, 2011) in terms of age, gender, marital status, country of origin, employer, and work experience.

The reasons to move to Malaysia include professional development; experiencing cultural diversity; prestige for working abroad; ample research opportunities; and the present situation at home

Future Work

The preliminary results form an integral part of the larger study that examines the reasons for self-initiated expatriation at an organisational level and the value of international experience from the Malaysia perspective.

Further analysis may guide the policy and procedures in framing an international human resource management practice to attract and retain expatriate academics of international repute into the institution of higher education in Malaysia.

Researchers

Dr Chye Kok HO Faculty of Business and Design Swinburne University of Technology Sarawak campus, Malaysia ckho@swinburne.edu.my Dr Patricia Yin Yin LAU Department of Management Monash University Sunway Campus, Malaysia patricia.lau@monash.edu

Dr. ChyeKok HO ckho@swinburne.edu.my +6082 260 739