With the spread of the new coronavirus infection, in 2020, many companies around the world were forced to rapidly shift to a work environment that mainly telework.Under such rapid changes, a behavior called "job crafting," which involves changing the content of one's own work in order to respond to changes in the environment, is likely to occur.
Job crafting includes “approaching job crafting,” in which job changes are made to approach higher goals and more challenging jobs, and “approaching job crafting,” in which job changes are made in order to avoid work load and stress. There is "evasive job crafting" that makes changes.
This time, a research group led by Kyoto University focused on job crafting for expatriates working at overseas subsidiaries of multinational companies.For employees stationed overseas, local language skills are a powerful resource in carrying out their duties.In other words, when expatriates adapt to the telework environment, we assumed that the level of local language skills would affect their job crafting methods, and conducted a survey.
The survey will be conducted twice in 2020, targeting expatriates working in various industries (manufacturing, services, finance, IT, etc.) in eight countries (USA, UK, Japan, Vietnam, Brazil, Germany, Sweden, Italy). There were 2 cases (8 males, 994 females, average age 543 years).
As a result, expatriates with high local language skills tended to adapt to the telework environment through approach-based job crafting and positive changes in work content, whereas expatriates with low local language skills tended to adapt to the telework environment through passive job crafting and passive job changes.On the other hand, when there is support from the company to improve language skills, the tendency for low local language skills to lead to adaptation through avoidant job crafting is weakened, and the avoidance method of adaptation It was also found to have the effect of suppressing
This study showed that fluency in the local language has various benefits for expatriates, and that differences in local language skills also influence job crafting methods.In the future, we will continue to conduct research that delves deeper into the characteristics of global human resources such as expatriates, and research on the role of language in multinational companies.
