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Qualified immigrants’ success: Exploring the motivation to migrate and to integrate

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Abstract

High-quality employees with international experience bring valuable advantages to internationally operating organizations. The growing number and importance of immigrants, and particularly qualified, university-educated immigrants, deserves more attention from international business practitioners and scholars. The market for highly qualified people within MNCs is increasingly becoming international, and ever more of them have migrated to a new country to advance their career. Such employees can be a source of competitive advantage for international firms. We use qualitative research with qualified immigrants (QIs) in France to argue that the success of QIs depends in large part on their motivation to integrate into their host country, which is largely explained by their motivation to migrate. From the qualitative data we derive four different types of qualified migrant, and suggest that the type will determine the success of the immigrant within, and outside, the organization. The relationship between the motivation to migrate and the motivation to integrate is moderated by “met expectations” and “organizational integration policies”, such that the effects of these, in turn, vary with type. Recognition of the types of QI and the moderating factors will be valuable for practitioners, as well as opening up research avenues for scholars.

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Notes

  1. The sample for our paper is made up of two different populations: the QI employees of North African origin and those from other countries. While assessing the motivations of each sample group, we realized that the QI samples displayed the same range of motivations: that is, we could not conclude that North Africans migrated for negative reasons, or on the basis of dissatisfaction with their country of origin, while the others migrated for positive reasons. Thus our typology applies to the QIs within our sample regardless of their origin, which leads us to claim that QI migration is a humanly universal experience, in line with Berry (1997). As the sample is made of 65% of men and 35% of women, and has a great variety of ages, we also controlled for gender and age. We could not find any differences between men and women, nor between different age groups, regarding our typology and our model. A minority of QIs in our sample (25%) are working in the public sector. We could not find differences between QIs in the private and public sector.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Editor David Thomas, and to three anonymous reviewers, whose time, care and insights have contributed greatly to this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Management Department, ESSEC Business School, Cergy-Pontoise, France

    Jean-Luc Cerdin

  2. COACTIS, University of Jean Monnet Saint-Etienne, Saint-Etienne, France

    Manel Abdeljalil Diné

  3. Henley Business School, University of Reading, Reading, UK

    Chris Brewster

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  1. Jean-Luc Cerdin
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  2. Manel Abdeljalil Diné
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  3. Chris Brewster
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Correspondence to Jean-Luc Cerdin.

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Accepted by David C. Thomas, Area Editor, 16 July 2013. This paper has been with the authors for five revisions.

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Cerdin, JL., Diné, M. & Brewster, C. Qualified immigrants’ success: Exploring the motivation to migrate and to integrate. J Int Bus Stud 45, 151–168 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/jibs.2013.45

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