PhD thesis final - Royal Holloway, University of London

Chapter 5 – Workplace belongingmay also be an important aspect when considering their well-being and feeling ofworkplace attachment. This is the focus of the discussion in next section.5.4. Workplace socialising, interactions and expatriate workers’ well-beingAlthough skilled expatriates‘ workplace interactions have been integrated in thediscussion of their transnationalism as demonstrated in their workplace practices (forexamples of this, see Beaverstock 2002), their effect on expatriate workers‘ emotionalexperiences in the workplace seems to draw insufficient attention. In this section, Idevelop on Altman and Low‘s (1992) understanding of people‘s feeling of workplaceattachment, which is arguably shaped by the employees‘ social relationships, throughaddressing how Taiwanese expatriates‘ interpersonal relationships and networking maycontribute to their feelings of workplace belonging.Taiwanese expatriates‘ workplace interactions and socialising are largely affected by thecomposition of the workforce in the China-based Taiwanese IT firms. As mentionedearlier, in my informant companies, there are not only divisions or departments takingcharge of different business (such as administration, engineering, R&D, production, andIT), each department is also divided into sections (i.e. teams or groups) that take chargeof different products and/or carry out different tasks. Usually, the leader of a unit, eithera department or a work team, is a Taiwanese expatriate who has a number of the PRCChinese employees to supervise 39 . Henry explained to me how the team system worksin his company:39 Increasingly, Taiwanese IT firms have some higher ranking PRC Chinese due to either cost cuttingconsiderations (having fewer Taiwanese expatriate staff), or from an increased focus on equalopportunity for Taiwanese and PRC Chinese employees.195