Adjustment of mainland Chinese academics and students to Singapore

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Abstract

This article studies the adjustment of mainland Chinese academics and students to the life in Singapore. It develops a model of international adjustment linking the effects of seven personal characteristics, namely prior international experience, predeparture knowledge, language competence, self-efficacy, extroversion, association with locals and social support, on general and interaction adjustment, as well as the effects of adjustment on performance. A survey was conducted on mainland Chinese academics and students in one of the two universities of Singapore. There were 91 valid responses from the former group and 210 valid responses from the latter. With the exception of prior international experience, the other six personal characteristics significantly affected general and/or interaction adjustment for at least one of the two groups. The result generally confirmed the relevance of these factors studied in previous adjustment research. Some interesting contrasts also emerge from comparing the findings of the two samples. These contrasts suggest that the role assumed by the sojourner may influence how certain personal characteristics affect adjustment and how adjustment affects performance.

Introduction

Singapore is a small city state with a population of about three million people. It has been enjoying enviable economic growth after gaining independence in 1965. It is one of the few Asian countries least affected by the current financial crisis. Without any natural resources, the success of Singapore relies entirely on its people. The government's policy is to develop the country into a vibrant international city. One strategy of achieving this objective is to absorb foreign talents. In the area of education, Singapore wants to become the educational hub of Asia. Foreign scholars and students are encouraged to work or study in the country.

Singapore's desire to attract foreign talents coincides with the brain drain problem suffered by China. With the opening up of China's economy since the late 1970s, more and more mainland Chinese look for opportunities in foreign countries, and for many of them, Singapore is a natural choice. A probable reason is that Singapore and China are similar in terms of culture. Compared with Western countries, Singapore might be a country where these mainland Chinese can blend into society more easily. As a result, during the past decade, there has been an increasing number of mainland Chinese academics and students coming to Singapore. These mainland Chinese have probably become the largest group of foreigners in the two local public universities. How well they adjust to the new environment can have direct impacts on their performance. For the academics, their adjustment may affect whether they can effectively dispatch their teaching, research, and administrative duties assigned to them by the universities. For the students, the main concern is whether they can achieve good academic results, which will increase their chance of being admitted for further studies or finding desirable jobs after graduation. Those mainland Chinese who fail to adapt may opt for leaving the country. Thus the issue of adjustment has serious personal as well as policy implications.

The purpose of this article is to study the adjustment of mainland Chinese academics and students to the life in Singapore. The next section presents an overview of the literature on international adjustment. It is followed by a discussion of the extent of cultural differences between Singapore and China. Then hypotheses are developed and research methodology is presented. After analyzing the research findings, the article ends with a discussion of the contributions and limitations of the study.

Section snippets

Overview of the literature

This section gives a brief overview of the previous studies of international adjustment. In addition, relevant studies will be cited from time to time when hypotheses are developed in a later section. This section is not intended to be a detailed literature review. Interested readers may refer to several well-written reviews of the various aspects of international adjustment: problems of cross-cultural contact (Stening, 1979), psychological adjustment of sojourners to new cultures (Church, 1982

Cultural differences between Singapore and China

About three quarters of Singapore's population are ethnic Chinese. The other two major races are Malay and Indian. Singapore is commonly regarded as having a predominantly Chinese culture. Yet the multi-racial composition of its population suggests that the cultures of Singapore and China should be different, at least to a certain extent. It is unfortunate that China had not been included in Hofstede's (1980) landmark cross-cultural study. The three Chinese-majority societies, namely Hong Kong,

Hypotheses

This study makes use of the degree of international adjustment concept in the work by Black and colleagues. Of the three facets of the degree of adjustment, work adjustment is not relevant for our study because it concerns the adjustment to new job responsibilities when an expatriate manager is transferred within a multinational corporation from one country to another. Thus we focus on general and interaction adjustment only. The following constructs, which are supposed to affect general and

Samples

A questionnaire survey was conducted in late 1997 on a group of mainland Chinese academics and students working or studying in the main campus of one of the two public universities in Singapore. This group of people were born in China. Most of the students were undergraduates and they were recipients of scholarships offered by the Ministry of Education. As to the academics, many of them went overseas to study for doctoral degrees after completing their first degrees in China. Some of them had

Results

This section presents the results of the study. First, a brief profile of the respondents is reported and is followed by a comparison of their perceptions of the differences between Singapore and China. The data relating to the hypotheses and the model of adjustment are analyzed and interpreted by the statistical method of partial least squares (PLS) in two stages: (1) assessing the reliability and validity of the measures in the measurement model, followed by (2) assessing the structural

Discussion

As expected, the respondents perceived greater similarity between China and Singapore in terms of the cultural than the institutional environment. Despite the cultural similarity, the respondents still had to go through an adjustment process. With the exception of prior international experience, the other six factors significantly affected general and/or interaction adjustment for at least one of the samples. The result generally confirmed the relevance of these factors studied in previous

Conclusion

This Study tested an international adjustment model in the context of mainland Chinese academics and students working or studying in Singapore. The model, though parsimonious, managed to explain for significant portions of the variances associated with the two facets of adjustment. To conclude the article, this section discusses the contributions made by this study, its limitations, and some directions for future research.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Fang Yongqing for his useful comments, and Huang Hai Ying, Koh Siew Cheng, Leong Sook Kuen, Yap Peck Hui, Zhang Lei, and Zhao Quan for their research assistance, and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Eric Tsang is an associate professor at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. His research interests include international management, organizational learning, and strategic alliance. His articles have been published in Academy of Management Executive, Academy of Management Review, Human Relations, Organization Studies, Journal of Management Studies, Management International Review, Journal of World Business, International Business

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    Eric Tsang is an associate professor at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. His research interests include international management, organizational learning, and strategic alliance. His articles have been published in Academy of Management Executive, Academy of Management Review, Human Relations, Organization Studies, Journal of Management Studies, Management International Review, Journal of World Business, International Business Review, Journal of Business Venturing, Entrepreneurship: Theory and Practice, and other refereed journals.

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