Understanding the Performance of Hong Kong Expatriated Construction Professionals in Mainland China from the Stress Management Perspective

Assignment of expatriate construction professionals (CPs) is a common strategy for construction organizations to manage their construction projects outside their home country/district. The expatriate assignment is very expensive in terms of its cost for compensating expatriated CPs and the significance of their performance to the project success. However, expatriated CPs used to suffer from under performance, while rare study has investigated this problem through the stress management perspective. Given that stress is prominent among expatriated CPs, current study set out to fill in this research gap. Through purposive sampling technique in accordance with certain criteria, a questionnaire survey was adopted to collect data from expatriated Hong Kong CPs who are working in Mainland China. A total of 126 data were collected and are subjected to a series of statistical analyses, including correlation and regression analysis. The results show that there is both negative linear relationship and inverted U-shaped relationship between same pair of stress and performance for expatriated CPs, namely frustration decreases their intention to stay. This indicates that the excessive stress level has been harming the expatriated CPs’ intention to stay. In addition, unhappiness negatively reduces belongingness, but it affects trust among colleagues in an inverted U-shaped manner. To manage the expatriated CPs’ stress and improve their performance, the construction organizations are recommended to provide counselling, therapy and other stress management program like mindfulness based stress management program.