A Typological Theory of Domestic Employees’ Acculturation Stress and Adaptation in the Context of Globalization

Abstract

Integrating Hobfoll's (1989) conservation of resources theory with Berry's (1997) acculturation taxonomies, we develop a typological theory to explain the acculturation stress and adaptation processes of domestic employees in the context of globalization. From a resource-based perspective, we first identify four resources – social dominance, ethnocentric orientation, social capital, and absorptive capacity – that represent Hobfoll's four kinds of resources (i.e., object, personal, condition, and energy) and differentiate them in terms of their goal (i.e., maintaining the original culture or seeking intercultural interactions) and orientation (i.e., individual or social). We postulate that domestic employees' loss and gain of these resources set boundary conditions for acculturation stress in response to the influence of globalization. Then, drawing on Berry's taxonomies, we configure different combinations of the loss and gain of these resources to form individual and collective ideal types of resources that set boundary conditions for the influence of acculturation stress on adaptation approaches (i.e., integration, assimilation, separation, and marginalization) at the individual level and the influence of globalization on adaptation cultures (i.e., multiculturalism, melting pot, segregation, and exclusion) at the organizational level. Finally, we propose that adaptation cultures exert influences on domestic employees' normative freedom of choice of adaptation approaches.