International Assignments for Career Building: A Model of Agency Relationships and Psychological Contracts

Abstract

We present a theoretical model of international assignments in which we examine the alignment or nonalignment of the organization's and the individual's expectations of an assignment and its effect on assignment success. We consider four basic configurations in our model—mutual loyalty, mutual transaction, agent opportunism, and principal opportunism—and present a matrix of organization-individual alignment to help predict varying degrees of success in expatriate assignment and in repatriation. Finally, we apply this matrix as a framework for understanding changes in the employment contract over time.