| dc.description.abstract | The economic relationship between Taiwan and mainland China has shifted into high gear during the past decade, and business exchange, especially in human talent is still escalating. “Taiwanese expatriates businessmen in China” (or Tai-Shang) plays a special and important role in the development of the Chinese economy. However, studies have shown that expatriates turnover seriously affects companies’ cost and performance. Therefore, managers should try to understand the reasons for turnover of these expatriate employees in order to increase effectiveness. Past researches have shown that work-family conflict generated from expatriate assignments is related to turnover intention. Since July 2008, “direct flights across the Taiwan Strait” was started, since its absence almost sixty years ago, and was since intensifying gradually. Thus, the remoteness between Taiwan and mainland China has been closing dramatically.
This study takes this changing opportunity to look into whether changes in remoteness in expatriate assignments affects work-family conflict, and whether it in-turn result in a change in turnover intention. This study adopts Ahuja’s turnover intention model, and supplemented with an “expatriate remoteness” construct. In the proposed model, expatriates are divided into three types, namely, “long-term expatriates with family in China,” “long-term expatriates and family in Taiwan” and “business travelers”. “Expatriate remoteness” is taken as a determinant of “work-family conflict”. “Expatriate type” is the moderator of the relationship between expatriate remoteness and work-family conflict. “Organization commitment” and “work exhaustion” are the mediators of turnover intention.
Taiwanese expatriates of various types were used as mail questionnaire samples in this study. A total of 145 samples were collected. Analyses show that, as expected, “expatriate remoteness” is positively associated with “work-family conflict” while the association is moderated by “expatriate type.” For “long-term expatriate with family in China,” and “long-term expatriate with family in Taiwan,” the association is positively but at different degree. In other words, direct flights shorten the distance and may effectively decrease work-family conflict. In addition, “Organization commitment” is negatively associated with “turnover intention,” while “work exhaustion” is positive associated with “turnover intention.”
Finally, this study also conducted an exploratory study, employing the cluster analysis method. The samples can be divided into four types, namely, “burnout employees,” “self-centered employees,” “company man” and “happy employees.” Results also show that marital status and number of children is not a cause of work-family conflict for expatriates, whereas whether living with families is a major factor.
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