Of discovery and dread: The importance of work challenges for international business travelers' thriving and global role turnover intentions

• Date: 01 May 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/job.2430
• Author: Mihaela Dimitrova
• Published date: 01 May 2020

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Of discovery and dread: The importance of work challenges for

international business travelers' thriving and global role

turnover intentions

Mihaela Dimitrova

Department of Global Business and Trade, WU

Vienna, Vienna, Austria

Correspondence

Mihaela Dimitrova, Department of Global

Business and Trade, WU Vienna,

Welthandelsplatz 1, Building D1, 1020 Vienna,

Austria.

Email: mdimitro@wu.ac.at

Summary

As frequent travel across international borders has become common for an ever-

increasing number of workers, it is essential to understand what helps these interna-

tional business travelers (IBTs) thrive and embrace their global work responsibilities.

This study's purpose is to examine the role of developmental opportunities (i.e., work

role challenges) in helping IBTs see frequent travel as a predominantly beneficial

experience. By integrating two theories of motivation—conservation of resources

theory and the challenge-hindrance demands framework—I build a moderated media-

tion model of IBTs' intent to cease their global work responsibilities (i.e., global role

turnover intentions). Using latent moderated structural equation modeling, I test the

model on a sample of 204 IBTs collected at two time points. Results show that,

through the psychological state of thriving at work, travel frequency has a negative

indirect association with IBTs' global role turnover intentions when IBTs' work roles

are challenging and a positive association when their work lacks challenge. This is pri-

marily the case regarding the challenge of being responsible for others at work. The

novelty of IBTs' work tasks is also a salient challenge but to a lesser extent. This

study contributes to literatures on global work, work role design, and thriving.

KEYWORDS

conservation of resources (COR) theory, global role turnover intentions, international business

travel, thriving, work role challenges

1|INTRODUCTION

Although international leisure travel is weighted toward pleasure,

traveling for work combines enriching experiences with frustration

and hardship (Westman, 2004). International travel has become com-

mon because of employers' increasing need for a global presence. In

particular, mobility is critical for international business travelers (IBTs)

who make short, intermittent trips (Welch, Welch, & Worm, 2007). As

organizations must increasingly attract and retain employees to travel

internationally (Collings & Isichei, 2018), research into frequent inter-

national travel has grown (Shaffer, Kraimer, Chen, & Bolino, 2012).

Still, neither what makes traveling enriching rather than depleting nor

when it motivates rather than deters IBTs to persevere in their global

roles is clearly understood. Because IBTs often possess critical knowl-

edge about foreign markets, company subsidiaries, and international

clients (Oddou, Mendenhall, & Ritchie, 2000; Welch et al., 2007),

Received: 1 March 2019 Revised: 20 December 2019 Accepted: 14 January 2020

DOI: 10.1002/job.2430

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any

medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

© 2020 The Authors. Journal of Organizational Behavior published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd

J Organ Behav. 2020;41:369–383. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/job 369