When the Chinese guy becomes the female IT specialist Liu – a conceptualization of reputational shifts in international assignments

Purpose - International assignments rely on interactions between host country nationals (HCNs) and an international assignee (IA). These interactions are significantly determined by the reputation that the IA holds among HCNs. However, reputation has only scarcely been addressed in extant mobility research, and there is a lack of understanding about how the reputation of an IA shifts among HCNs during the course of an assignment. The purpose of this paper is to understand the development of an individual's reputation as well as the interactions between an IA and HCNs in the context of international assignments. Design/methodology/approach - This is a conceptual paper that builds upon the central idea in extant research of individual reputation as a social construction and draws on sensemaking theory to develop its conceptual model. Findings - As extant research argues for both a temporal and dynamic dimension of reputation, the authors introduce time and reputational richness as central model elements. Furthermore, the conceptual model proposes reputational events as the principal triggers for reputational shifts. Reputational events reveal quantitatively and qualitatively new informational cues about the IA to HCNs, who then use these cues to incrementally construct the IA's reputation in sensemaking processes. In addition, contextual factors of reputational shifts, namely accelerators and amplifiers, are discussed. The authors argue that these contextual factors may affect both the timing and the strength of reputational shifts. Originality/value - The study introduces a novel conceptual model and contributes to the understanding of individual reputation development as well as the interactions between an IA and HCNs in international assignments.