US managers' willingness to accept a global assignment: do expatriate benefits and assignment length make a difference?

Drawing on key tenets of expectancy theory, the present research study investigates the degree to which twelve different expatriate benefits explain managerial willingness to accept short-term and long-term global assignments. Hypotheses regarding main and interaction effects were tested on a sample of 418 globally oriented graduates of a top-ranked master's of international business studies programme at a university in the south-eastern United States. Analysing the data with ANOVA, nine out of the thirteen hypotheses were supported with all of the expatriate benefits having either main or interactive effects. A discussion and areas for future research are presented.