Nationalism at Work: Introducing the “Nationality-Based Organizational Climate Inventory” and Assessing Its Impact on the Turnover Intention of Foreign Employees

While from 1990 to 2015 the total number of civilian employed workers in the US rose by 30.4%, the share of foreign-born employed workers in the US workforce nearly doubled, from 9.2% in 1990, to 17.1% in 2015 (MPI 2017). Almost half of them were naturalized citizens in 2015 (MPI 2017). However, naturalization does not perforce change an individual’s national identity, nor the way in which an individual is perceived, and treated, in national terms (Momen 2018). Within Europe, the European Union and its common labour market mean that naturalizations are no longer necessary for intra-European mobility, at least for most European countries. This is one reason for the ongoing process of the European workforce becoming increasingly nationally diverse. In 2017, throughout the whole of the EU (EU 28), 7.9% of the workforce had a citizenship different from that of the country they were working in. For the ‘older’ Western EU member states (EU 15) the share was 9.7%. The countries with the highest share of foreigners amongst their workforce were Luxembourg (54.1%), Cyprus (20.8%), Ireland (16.4%), Austria (15.45%), Estonia (13.7%), the UK (11.5%), Germany (11.2%), and Spain (11.05%). However, all EU countries have registered an increase in the share of foreign workers in the last decade (eurostat 2017).

It should be noted that the situation for foreign employees who were sent abroad by an international organization or company to a foreign subsidiary or headquarters might be somewhat different from the situations self-initiated expatriates find themselves in (Froese and Peltokorpi 2013; Peiperl et al. 2014). However, for the purposes of this paper, this distinction is not necessary, and the terms ‘foreign employee’, ‘migrant’ or ‘expatriate’ are used interchangeably. The crucial characteristic that all of them share is that of being foreign employees (Andresen et al. 2014; Berry and Bell 2012), no matter if their original plan was to live abroad on an indefinite basis (Cerdin et al. 2014), or to repatriate within a certain period (Cerdin and Selmer 2014). In any case, very often, these plans are subject to change (Naumann 1992).

‘Knowing whom’ differs from the element ‘links’ of the concept ‘embeddedness’. “Embeddedness addresses the number of links individuals have” (Feldman and Ng 2007, p. 338) and this “number of strands connects an employee […] in a social, psychological, and financial web” (Mallol et al. 2007, p. 36). Thus, a higher number of links means a closer bond to the organization. In contrast, ‘knowing whom’ is less quantitative, and has a stronger qualitative focus, as it is more about meeting the ‘right’ people, and “getting to know people who may be helpful to their own career development” (Jokinen et al. 2008, p. 981). People that strengthen one’s career capital also constitute links in one’s ‘webs’, but, conversely, one’s links do not perforce enhance career capital. Thus, although the constructs ‘knowing whom’ and ‘links’ have a certain overlap, they have different directions of impact, reflected through the different concepts to which they belong.

Most items are taken from scales published in English sources, and in this article, they are also quoted in English. However, as our survey was conducted in German language, we have used the translation-back-translation method (Harkness 2003), to transfer these English items into German.