ABSTRACT
Work–life balance (WLB) concerns are often critical to international assignments. Experienced international managers mention them as one of the key challenges in their career (Suutari, 2003), and the majority of international assignees (IAs) report work as regularly interfering with their private life (Grant-Vallone & Ensher, 2001). Indeed, work is more disruptive to private life in expatriation than in domestic assignments (IRC/ORC, 2006/2007; Shortland & Cummins, 2007), and the disruptions caused by expatriation are thus likely to affect the often fragile balance in couples and families (Caligiuri, Hyland, Joshi, & Bross, 1998; Lazarova, Westman, & Shaffer, 2010). This view is also supported by the Global Relocation Trends of 2012, since expatriates consider family issues to be the most important cause of premature departures from an international assignment (GMAC, 2012). Family related concerns were also found to be the main reason for turning down an international assignment, accounting for more than half of refusals: 34 percent of them were due to family concerns, and 17 percent related to a spouse's career. Generally, it seems that when abroad, the boundaries between private and professional life are weaker (Caligiuri & Lazarova, 2005), with problems like stress in one domain more easily affecting the other than in domestic cases.
