In the last few decades, Taiwan’s business moves towards globalization rapidly. Hence, it is an important issue to effectively manage expatriate employees with the purpose of improving performance and ensuring the effectiveness of operations in Taiwanese corporation. The human resource personnel need to understand the multi-faceted nature of their employees’ identities and maximize the potential of each employee. Adjusting to an international assignment can provoke the feelings of helplessness in an unprepared expatriate employee, who may have difficulty sorting out appropriate behaviors from inappropriate ones.
Through this study, we found that role conflicts and job requirements, as sources of job stress in Taiwanese multinational enterprises, directly and negatively influence both job involvement and job satisfaction among expatriate employees. Therefore, we suggest that role discretion enables individuals to adapt their job roles and set themselves rather than adapting themselves to the situation, thereby facilitating innovative behaviors on the part of the role incumbent. Additionally, given the associations between job involvement, job satisfaction and expatriate adjustment, multinational corporations need to ensure that they have human resource policies and practices of support for their expatriates while abroad. Finally, we found that personal stress management will moderate the relationship between expatriate adjustment and working attitude. This is an important finding for multinational corporations, as they can offer stress management training to employees before sending them abroad. Such a practice will lower the failure rate, and improve expatriate performance.