The Influence of Emotional Intelligence and Cultural Adaptability on Cross-Cultural Adjustment and Performance with the Mediating Effect of Cross-Cultural Competence: A Study of Expatriates in Taiwan

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The study consists of a great literature review with a massive amount of earlier studies on the topic.

However, the distinction between CCC and CIN was not always clear for the reviewer. At Ch. 2.1 authors write: “It [CIN] includes an individual’s cultural competency” (line 100), and it is a “repertoire of cognitive, behavioral, and motivational abilities to work and collaborate effectively with others”, while CCC is defined as “an individual’s effectiveness in drawing upon a set of knowledge, skills, and personal attributes to work successfully with people from different national cultural backgrounds at home or abroad.” (line 174-176). A clearer distinction would be helpful.

In line 72-73, the authors write: “Johnson et al. (2006) proposed that CIN is antecedent of CCC that can assist expatriates in performing better on international assignments.” That sentence is repeated almost verbatim in line 196-197 which is a bit odd.

It is not clear what the authors wanted to say with the sentence: “In the past, CIN has been associated with student’s CAD (Ward et al. 2011).” (line 161) The authors should be a bit more specific.

The study uses sophisticated statistical methods in order to explore the relationship among numerous variables related to cross-cultural adjustment and performance.

There is a comprehensive description of the sample used in Table 2, but for the reviewer the composition of the sample in terms of nationality was missing. In a study that focuses on cross-cultural competencies, adaptability, and adjustment, it seems to be important to know where the expatriates in the sample are coming. It is certainly understood that it might be a future research direction to examine the role of nationality variables, but it is still important to know what nationalities were included into the sample per se.

It would be helpful for readers to summarize in a paragraph what the novel findings of the paper are. Of course, there are some findings in the study that are new and enrich the existing literature, but they are scattered all over the study, and there are some findings that seem to be mere replication of the results of other studies. It would be beneficial to make it explicit what the major contributions of the paper to the scientific discourse are.

The paper is full of acronyms that are a bit hard to read. In Table 1 authors use MPQ that should be explained, it is not obvious. The authors also should mention what NT stands for (it might not be trivial for some readers).

There are some disturbing typos in the text. See “Erope” in line 56, “religion” in line 66, and “more study” in line 86.

Author Response

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Reviewer 2 Report

Interesting and important topic, however, the article presents only the results of a local survey. Thus, the title is inappropriate and should indicate the research perspective.

The literature review should be improved. It is inappropriate to refer so many times to works from the 1990s, 1980s, 2000s or even 2010s. These are quite old publications. Moreover, the authors did not indicate how the data for Table 1 was selected. Authors need to update the literature background. To prove that the article fits the journal scope, please refer to the texts published in it.

Concerning the research: quite obvious and often overlapping hypotheses. They are assessed, as the authors admit, based on the subjective opinions of the respondents about themselves. On that basis, it is possible to analyse the level of respondents' self-esteem, and not the given hypotheses. In my opinion, what the authors indicate as future research should be done now.

In addition: not proper way of including references (1), links in the table 1 indicate the texts’ sources (Wikipedia), please provide the address/name of the manufacturer of the software used.

Author Response

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Reviewer 3 Report

First of all I would like to congratulate authors for this interesting study and the subject they have chosen. I believe this research is very interesting, and that the paper here proposed has the conditions to be published. However, I have just a few considerations that, from my point of view, would make this publication even more interesting.

The main issue is related with the number of hypothesis that authors have chosen. I consider that a research with 20 hypotheses is not very operational, nor even much adequate. As so, from my point of view, and without taking the quality of the paper, I let to the authors' consideration, the chance of reducing critically the hypothesis. I understand that SEM can deal with several hypothesis, however I would advise authors to chose a maximum of 5-7 hypothesis and concentrate their analysis in those hypothesis.

This would make paper more interesting and operational, without making readers losing in such a big number of topics. From my point of view this is even more critical giving the dimension of the sample used (340), which restricts the number of connections possible to analyse in deeper detail through SEM.

I also consider that the first paragraphs of results (section 4.1.) are in deed part of the methodological section and would be better there.

Reinforcing my ideas previously stated about the big number of hypothesis, we notice that at the end of the paper, authors do not refer explicitly (despite we can infer for some of them what happens) whose hypothesis were confirmed or not confirmed. As so, one may ask: why to refer them? This is something that authors should revise.

At the same time, there is a misunderstanding concerning the section of results, the discussion, and the conclusions do not appear explicitly, as they should.

I believe authors have all these elements there, but this need to be clearly reflected in the paper, and synthetised in order to facilitate the readers' work

 

Author Response

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Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

The article has been significantly improved. Previous comments have been taken into account. The reduction of hypotheses significantly improved the quality of the article. However, the H8 in Figure 2 is not in the text. The article is suitable for publication.

Author Response

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Reviewer 3 Report

First of all I would like to congratulate authors for the efforts done to improve substantially this paper, compared to the previous version reviewed. I would like to start by saying that changes made in the version that I reviewed here are substantial and it is not easy to understand clearly the dimension of the text (and sometimes the coherence of the thoughts) given the text editing characters.

Despite these problems concerning the basis for the analysis and review, I consider that the new version is clearly more in line with the quality demanded for Sustainability.

It is important to notice that authors have tried to follow previous reviewers’ comments and I consider that they have answered adequately those proposals. The result is a much more focused paper, more straight line, more clear results, and much focused contributions. Congratulations for this.

Having said this, I consider that just some minor changes must be made in order to make definitely this proposal a publishable paper. I refer mostly to three main aspects:

• Despite authors’ effort to reduce the number of hypothesis, they are still using 8-12 hypothesis, in reality. From my point of view this is too much. However, I must agree that the model used may answer to all these hypotheses, which make us come to another issue: will it be explicative, in deed, of the problem addressed? Isn’t it too complicate to be operationalized? This is the main doubt that your paper makes me thinking.
• the capacity to condense some pars of the text that are too much descriptive, especially section 5. Discussion. I would suggest dividing it in two different sections: Discussions, and Conclusions and contributions. This would make the paper more readable.
• another effort to present more updated references, regarding some concrete topics under discussion. I am referring mainly to the section 2. Literature Review and Hypothesis development, sub-sections 2.4. Cross-cultural competence; 2.6. Expatriate performance; and 2.7. The mediation effects of Cross-cultural competence.

 

Author Response

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