Cross-cultural adjustment of skilled migrants in a multicultural and multilingual environment: an explorative study of foreign employees and their spouses in the Swiss context

Abstract

Skilled migrants are essential to the global economy, and both employers and states depend on them to maintain their competitive advantage. This is particularly true for the Swiss economy, which attracts an impressive number of migrants to counteract the national shortage of skilled workers. The Swiss context is particularly interesting to study because of the strong presence of multinational companies and a situation where the difference between qualified migrants and assigned expatriates is increasingly ethereal. Our study focuses on the adjustment of a population of 152 foreign employees from Swiss-based multinational companies and the adjustment of 126 spouses. We studied different adjustment dimensions focusing on local language proficiency and relocation support practices. Despite the highly multicultural and multilingual Swiss context, our data analysis highlighted relatively low cross-cultural adjustment scores (especially interaction adjustment). We uncovered the degree to which relocation support practices are offered, used and perceived as necessary by foreign employees and showed which support practices could be used to improve the adjustment of migrants.